Plural Lives:
Mitt Romney’s Polygamous Heritage
Todd M. Compton
© 2012 Todd Compton. Unauthorized copying or distribution of this work, except as provided under “fair use,” is prohibited.
In summer 1885, Miles Park Romney, Mitt Romney’s great-grandfather, wearing a disguise, boarded a train in Salt Lake City with his wife, Annie Woodbury Romney, and her three young children. He may have sat apart from them, to preserve his incognito. They traveled to San Francisco, then east through California and into Arizona. At the San Simon railway station in southeastern Arizona, in Cochise County, near the New Mexico border, Will and Miles Archibald Romney, two of Miles Park’s older sons, met their father and Annie with a team and wagon, which would transport them to Mormon settlements that were just beginning in Mexico.
Why was Miles Park moving to Mexico? Annie was his fourth wife. Will was the son of his second wife, Carrie, and Miles Archibald was the son of his first wife, Hannah. Earlier in the year, Miles had left his home in St. Johns, in eastern Arizona to escape federal marshals who sought to arrest him and his wives on charges of “unlawful cohabitation,” polygamy. Therefore, he was “advised by the Presidency of the [LDS] Church to flee to Old Mexico for safety,” according to a family history. Church leaders knew that Miles was a prominent target for U.S. marshals, as he had been a church leader and a combative newspaper editor in Arizona, and they probably also realized that his talents as a builder would be invaluable in the pioneering Mormon colonies in Mexico.[1]
