Alma 5:6 “ And now behold I say unto you, my brethren, you that belong to this church, have you sufficiently retained in remembrance the captivity of your fathers? Yea, and have you sufficiently retained in remembrance his mercy and long suffering towards them? And moreover, have ye sufficiently retained in remembrance that he has delivered their souls from hell?”
John Bennion was born in the little village of Hawarden in Flintshire, Wales. His father had little chance for education in school and had to earn his living from about age 12. He went into the employ of farmers by the year for a livelihood until grown, when he married Elizabeth Roberts. After his marriage, John’s father changed his labors from a servant hired by the year to a day laborer at which he continued two or three years, until he had saved a little money, after which he took a small farm to rent in the township of Moor in Hawarden Parish where he procured a comfortable livelihood on about twelve acres of land for raising hay, grain, vegetables and pasture, besides a garden and orchards.
As John grew to be a teenager, going to Sunday School and to hear preaching became burdensome to him and he choose rather to spend the Sunday with his friends. One Sunday, he with two others were rambling through the fields with a dog chasing rabbits when the dog caught one. A watcher came upon them and declared they were poaching. Next day he was summoned to appear before a justice for trial, but determined not to submit to such proceedings, he ran away to Liverpool.
In Liverpool, John worked for a boilermaker. There he heard two elders preaching the gospel in its fullness; namely, John Taylor and Joseph Fielding. After much study, he became convinced that what they were teaching was of God and was baptized by Priest Robert Reid.
John and his brother Samuel came to America with their families and joined the saints in Nauvoo. Then driven from Nauvoo by the mobs, they crossed the plains to Utah. In 1849, Samuel and John Bennion and several other families moved south crossing the river Jordon on the ice in January. There was little in the way of building materials, so the families dug into the bluffs of the Jordan River for shelter. The tiny settlement, the first “over Jordan,” was called Harker’s Settlement, and they began the difficult work of digging ditches to move water out of the Jordan River and onto the land on the west side. The soil was hard to work and they kept looking for better land to farm. The infamous crickets destroyed much of that year’s crop and so the group moved farther south to where Big Cottonwood Creek flowed into the Jordan River about 4800 South known then as Field’s Bottom. By working together eight families managed to bring in the first successful crop in 1851 using water brought down from Bingham Creek by what was later called Gardner’s Millrace. John and Esther Bennion’s daughter, Rachael, was the first pioneer child to be born in Field’s Bottom. Despite the struggle to get food and shelter in those early days, John Bennion described Field’s Bottom in these words:
“If peace dwells upon this earth it is here and here are the happiest and most prosperous people in the world, enjoying free soil, pure air, and liberty to worship our God just as we please.”
In his later years John Bennion was called on a mission to Wales. He visited Hawarden, Wales, to gather genealogy and visited with William E. Gladstone, then Prime Minister of England, at his home, Hawarden Castle, who expressed wonderment at the development in knowledge and understanding of affairs of one who had started out as the son of a tenant farmer on the Hawarden estate. He asked Elder Bennion how he, being so poor, seemed so educated and to know so much. John Bennion replied, “My education was in the kingdom of God and its priesthood.”
Henry B. Eyring, relating this meeting of Wm. E. Gladstone and John Bennion at the Nauvoo Temple dedication said:
“Our belief is that within these temples we are taught things that lift us and give us a perspective on life as it will be in the worlds to come, and as it can be here. Everything that happens in these temples is uplifting and gives people hope for this life and for the world to come.”
Marvelous Pigs in Satin 
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