Abraham Hoagland

Hoagland was born on March 24, 1797, in Hillsborough Township, New Jersey. He apprenticed as a blacksmith and moved to Michigan, where he became a prosperous blacksmith and farmer and helped settle present-day Royal Oak. While in Michigan, he joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1841.[1]

In 1843, he moved his family to Nauvoo, Illinois, where Joseph Smith ordained him an elder.[1] Orson Pratt and Wilford Woodruff ordained him a bishop in Winter Quarters, Nebraska after the saints were driven from Nauvoo. In 1853 and 1857, Hoagland was elected an alderman of Salt Lake City.[2] When Brigham Young sent John Murdock to open a mission in Australia in 1851, Hoagland took his place as bishop of the 14th ward in Salt Lake City,[1][3] where he chose Wilford Woodruff's first wife, Phoebe, as the ward's first Relief Society president.[4]

Hoagland began practicing plural marriage in 1847 when he married Agnes Taylor, the younger sister of later church president John Taylor. They divorced in 1861.[5] Hoagland was the grandfather of Abraham H. Cannon and the father-in-law of both William Whitaker Taylor and George Q. Cannon.[6] He was a member of Wilford Woodruff's prayer circle.[7] He died of pneumonia on February 14, 1872, in Salt Lake City.[1]