"While their backs were turned, prying out the gable end of the house, we went, and got our arms full, and were turning away, when some of the mob saw us and called on us to stop, but we ran as fast! as we could." — Mary Elizabeth Rollins¹

Mary Elizabeth Rollins, born on April 9, 1818, in Lima, New York, moved to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1828 and was baptized into the Church in October 1830. In 1831, her family moved to Independence, Missouri.² During a mob attack on the Saints' printing office, fifteen-year-old Mary and her sister Caroline bravely rescued scattered pages of the Book of Commandments. Despite the danger, they hid the pages in a cornfield, later giving them to Sally Phelps for safekeeping.³ She was part of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo and later moved to Utah.²

1. "Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner," Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine, July 1926, archive.org

2. "Lightner, Mary Elizabeth Rollins," josephsmithpapers.org

3. Saints, Volume 1, Chapter 16, 178-181