Their Story
Rhoda Keziah Mendenhall was born July 25, 1869 at what is known as Bear River Ranch in Idaho. She lived there until about twelve years of age, when her father bought a home in Franklin and the family moved. Her father still lived on the ranch, and when she grew a little older she went out to cook for her father and the hired men, while her mother stayed in Franklin and cared for the rest of the family.
While on the ranch she made butter and sold it to Mrs. Paul, who kept a hotel in Battle Creek. She had a pony of her own, and when she came to Franklin she had to ford Bear River — in the spring the water rose so high it washed the bridge away, and when they crossed in a wagon they had to tie the box down so it would not float off.
She attended school in Bear River and Franklin, and one year at the Brigham Young College in Logan, Utah. On December 9, 1891 she married John Wilkinson in the Logan Temple. Besides raising a family she served as secretary in the Sunday School, sang in the choir, was second counselor in the Mutual, and worked in the Primary.
On September 19, 1898, shortly before her third child was expected and while John had gone to the canyon, a violent east wind rose. Frightened, she took her two small children to her mother's. When she slipped home for the things she needed she found the summer kitchen blown away, the doors flung open and the windows blown out. Her baby boy was born dead that night, and from that ordeal she carried an affliction the rest of her life.
In April 1910 John was taken to a Salt Lake City hospital and operated on for cancer. He died soon after, leaving Rhoda with their six living children — the oldest, Herbert, eighteen, and the youngest, Rhoda, five months. Before he died he had built a barn and drawn plans for a home; Rhoda carried out his plans and built the house herself. [The biography continues in the scan.]
John, in his own valley
John stood six foot six — Rhoda so short, it was said, that she could stand beneath his outstretched arm. He was remembered for playing baseball and for his generosity, especially toward the older folk of Franklin. With his brother Uriah he owned much of the hillside east of town and ran sheep there; John was the businessman of the two, and neighbors said that had he lived he would have been a wealthy man. He served on the committee that organized Franklin's first Idaho Day Celebration — and died on May 6, 1910, just over a month before the June celebration he had helped to plan. It went on to become one of the biggest in the valley.
In late April 1910 John and Rhoda made the long trip south to Salt Lake City — more than a hundred miles from Franklin — where he had gone for his operation. The Deseret Evening News marked their arrival with a single line among the city’s hotel guests: the Wilkinsons of Franklin, Idaho, were “at the Wilson.” It is a small window onto another age of medicine, when a cancer operation meant days of travel and a stay in a downtown hotel of three hundred rooms.
His daughter Audra, later Audra Wilkinson Swainston, remembered walking with her father and her sisters to the Franklin train station the day he left for the Salt Lake hospital. He died there during surgery, and his body came home to Franklin by train — and Audra, just ten years old, walked to the station once more the day “papa came home.” — from a family memory preserved on FamilySearch
