Biography

Arizona Church Hawley was the last child of her parents, Thomas Holiday and Harriet Elnora Burchard Church, to be born in Tennessee. She crossed the plains as a baby with her parents and eight siblings to gather with the Saints in Utah Territory. Her white father and biracial mother joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Tennessee and as committed members of the Church wanted to raise their large family with other members of their faith. They chose a small farming town in Millard County named Deseret to settle themselves and their numerous children. Once in Utah, one more brother and two more sisters were born after Arizona or “Zona,” as she was called. She grew up with ten siblings. Like her parents, Zona remained a member of the Church her entire life and had a large family of her own. She lived exclusively in central Utah.

The Church family’s origins in Tennessee were somewhat remarkable. Her mother, Harriet, had been enslaved to her father, Thomas and his first wife. After the death of Thomas’s first wife, he married Harriet and thereby legitimized the children that he had already fathered with her. Thomas and his siblings joined the Church in the 1840s, while Harriet was baptized in 1876, shortly before the family left for the West.[1]

Arizona was born on March 16, 1877, in Maury County, Tennessee. Sometime before her first birthday, she left the South with her family as they made the trek to Utah Territory. After arriving in Deseret, the Churches brought one-year-old Arizona to their Latter-day Saint meetinghouse to be blessed by the elders of the Deseret Ward or congregation. It was usually the practice to bless and name very young babies, but in this case, now among more believers, Thomas and Harriet took the opportunity to provide Arizona with the blessing she had missed before they left Tennessee.[2]

In the spring of 1885, on May 7, after she had turned eight, Samuel W. Western baptized Arizona and H. C. Moody confirmed her as a member of the Church on the same day.[3] Zona was the latest of Thomas and Harriet’s children to be baptized. All seven of her older siblings had been baptized as children as well.

As early as 1892, the Church family moved from Deseret to Oasis, a small Mormon village, also in Millard County. Growing up in Oasis, Zona did not have the opportunity to benefit from a great deal of formal education, but she made the most of the limited time she spent in school. Her daughter said, “She could out spell anyone of us and constantly corrected our English.”[4]

Zona married Sims Matheny Hawley on July 1, 1893. Sims had been born in Deseret, so Zona may have known him in her childhood. Even still, his family lived for a period of time in Fillmore, another farming community about forty miles away but also in Millard County, where his father farmed. At the time of their marriage, Sims lived in Oasis and he and Zona were married there. He was ten years her elder. Zona was only fifteen when she married, although the marriage license incorrectly reports her age as sixteen. It reveals that her father had to give his consent for the marriage to take place. They were married by a Justice of the Peace.[5]

After their marriage, Sims and Zona farmed in Oasis.[6] They would continue to do so for many years, as their parents had done before them.

One year after they married, their first son, Oral Sims was born on August 24, 1893, but lived only a little over a year before he died on November 27, 1894. Zona went on to give birth to eight more children, all of whom lived to adulthood, including a pair of twins.[7] In 1900, Sims’ mother and aunt lived with Sims and Zona and their three young children. They may have provided help around the house to the young mother who was no doubt kept busy with her children.[8]

It appears that Zona’s racial heritage did not impede her full participation in the Church. Nor did it present a barrier to her receiving a temple endowment and marriage sealing, this even though local leaders had barred her brother from priesthood ordination in 1900 because of his racial ancestry.[9] She, like the rest of the family, was always considered “white” after arriving in Utah. On November 19, 1909, she and Sims traveled to Salt Lake City with their five living children, where Sims and Zona were washed, anointed, and endowed in the temple. Following these rites, they were sealed together as a couple and their young children were also sealed to them in a familial ceremony meant to bind parents and children together for eternity.[10]

The temple rituals that took place were likely in preparation for the mission Sims was called to serve. Four days after arriving in Salt Lake, Sims was set apart as a missionary to the Northwestern States. He was forty-two years old on November 23, when he was set apart.[11] Zona was then left with the responsibility to maintain the home and take care of their children by herself until he returned. Fortunately, she was close to her family for support.

After Sims completed his mission and rejoined his family, other than a short stay in Eureka, Juab County, Utah, the Hawleys remained in Oasis, where they continued to farm. Zona gave birth to twin boys and the couple’s youngest daughter after Sims returned from his missionary service.[12]

Zona and her husband remained participating members of their faith for the rest of their lives. The Hawleys baptized their children in the Church and their family appeared in many Church censuses beginning with the first Latter-day Saint census in 1914. Zona was a member of the Relief Society, the Church’s organization for women and Sims was a High Priest in the Melchezidek Priesthood. Their sons were ordained to the Church’s lay priesthood and most of their children participated in temple ordinances as adults.[13]

Zona and her sister, Hattie, traveled to the Salt Lake Temple in 1924 after the death of their parents, Thomas and Harriet Church. Their parents had both received temple endowments and had been sealed in a marriage ceremony during their lifetimes, but had not been bound together in a familial sealing to their children. On April 9, 1924, the sisters engaged in a proxy sealing ceremony designed to connect them in what they believed would be an eternal family unit with their parents and each other.[14]

Life went along as usual until Sims developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig Disease. The disease is a progressive neurodegenerative illness that leads to paralysis and death. Sims died on December 3, 1927, at the age of 60, in Salt Lake City. He had spent the last three years before his death there, likely in a care facility. It would have been very difficult, if not impossible for Zona to take care of him at home in Oasis.[15]

After Sims’ death, Zona was left, for the second time, to support her children and to run the farm. Her twin sons, Eldon and Melvin, were fifteen when their father died, and her youngest daughter, Manon was only eleven, but her older children had married and moved out of the family home. By 1930, the census shows her three youngest children still under her roof. She owned the home and the adjoining alfalfa farm, and her children would have been old enough to significantly contribute to the work needed to keep the enterprise going.[16] Manon’s obituary mentions her mother “working hard to take care of the family through the Great Depression.”[17] 

At the age of sixty-three, Zona lived with her son Melvin, who had married and, like his father, farmed in Oasis.[18] Ten years later, Zona lived next door to Melvin and his family, still in Oasis.[19] She continued to live in the town she had known her entire life until around 1955, when she moved to Delta, another small town in Millard County where her youngest daughter lived.[20] She spent her final days in the Hale Rest Home in Spanish Fork, a community about ninety miles north, in Utah County. That is where she died on August 8, 1962, from “causes incident to age.” Her body was returned to Oasis to be buried next to her husband, Sims, after a funeral service at the Oasis LDS Ward Chapel. Her obituary described her as “active” in the LDS Church. Eighty-five-year-old Arizona left seven children, seventeen grandchildren, and sixteen great-grandchildren to mourn her demise.[21]

The history of Zona’s religious life can be read as an illustration of the possibilities sometimes open to Mormons with Black African ancestry who lived on the color line during the many decades when their Church denied members of that lineage access to temples and priesthood ordination. Zona’s skin color was light enough to allow her to pass as white. However, within the small community where she lived the vast majority of her life, her neighbors were aware of her racial background. Her local leaders knew her mother and knew she was biracial, but in Zona’s case, they, evidently, ignored that fact and gave Zona the ability to fully participate in the life of the Church, including giving her access to temple ordinances. They seem to have agreed with the former theory that some people in her community had postulated in her brother, John’s, case in 1900, “provided the white blood predominates,” there should be no reason to keep a member out of the temple.[22]

By Tonya S. Reiter

[1] Tonya S. Reiter, “Harriet Elnora Burchard Church,” Century of Black Mormons.

[2] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, Deseret Ward (Utah), microfilm 25,885, Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[3] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, Deseret Ward (Utah), microfilm 25,885, Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah

[4] Lorraine H. Petty, “Thomas Holiday and Harriet Church,” Harriet Elnora Burchard (KWJ6-Z9P), FamilySearch, Family Tree Memories Page (accessed 15 September 2025).

[5] Utah, County Marriages, 1871-1941, Entry for Sims Matheny Hawley and Zona Church, 01 July 1893.

[6] United States, 1900 Census, Utah, Millard County, Oasis Precinct.

[7] See: Arizona Church (KWZJ-BPL), FamilySearch, Family Tree Details Page (accessed 15 September 2025); Ella Lorraine Hawley (KWZM-4QQ) 1895-1981; Nina Mae Hawley (KW6M-4L8) 1897-1972; Golden Matheny Hawley (KC2D-9GC) 1989-1930; Paul Legrand Hawley (KWZN-4ZT) 1902-1977; Armond Vard Hawley (KWZR-DGZ) 1907-1991; Eldon B. Hawley (KW8C-83Z), 1912-1993; Melvin J. Hawley (KWCA-F1P), 1912-2001; and Manon Hawley (KWZ2-GPT) 1916-2010.

[8] United States, 1900 Census, Utah, Millard County, Oasis Precinct.

[9] Tonya S. Reiter, “John Taylor Church,” Century of Black Mormons.

[10] Arizona Church (KWZJ-BPL), FamilySearch, Family Tree Ordinance Page (accessed 15 September 2025); Zona’s mother, Harriet, her sister Hattie, and brother, Robert had all been allowed to receive temple ordinances between 1901 and 1909 after her brother, John had been denied as a young man.

[11] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Sims Matheny Hawley,” Church History Biographical Database (accessed 14 September 2025).

[12] United States, 1910 Census, Utah, Millard County, Oasis; United States, 1920 Census, Utah, Juab County, Eureka. Sims and Zona owned a farm they worked in Eureka. She had brothers who lived there and that may have been the reason for the short relocation.

[13] “Hawley,” Presiding Bishopric, stake and mission census, 1914-1960, Family History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[14] Arizona Church (KWZJ-BPL), FamilySearch, Family Tree Ordinance Page (accessed 15 September 2025); Harriet Gertrude Church (KWZQ-K9F), FamilySearch, Family Tree Ordinance Page (accessed 15 September 2025); Later on, all of their siblings would be sealed to Thomas and Harriet, some in life, some in vicarious ordinances.

[15] Utah, State Board of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Certificate of Death, File No.1900, Sims Matheny Hawley, Utah Division of Archives and Record Services, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[16] United States, 1930 Census, Utah, Millard County, Oasis Precinct.

[17] “Manon Hawley Robison,” Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah), 15 April 2010.

[18] United States, 1940 Census, Utah, Millard County, Oasis.

[19] United States, 1950 Census, Utah, Millard County, Oasis.

[20] “Hawley,” Presiding Bishopric, stake and mission census, 1950, 1955, 1960, 1962, Deseret Stake, Delta 1^st Ward, May 12, 1955, CR 4 316, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[21] “Zona Church Hawley,” The Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City, Utah), 10 August 1962.

[22] George A. Smith Family Papers, 1931-1969, MS0036, box 78, folder 8, Council Meeting, 11 March 1900, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah; See Tonya S. Reiter, “John Taylor Church,” Century of Black Mormons.

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