Josephine Louvina Crismon

The Crismon Legacy in the Salt River Valley

Josephine's father, Charles Crismon, was born on Christmas Day 1805 in Christian County, Kentucky. He converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1837 and followed the Saints through every major station of the Mormon migration: Nauvoo, the expulsion of February 1846, the winter camps, and finally the Salt Lake Valley, where he arrived with the Daniel Spencer Company on October 4, 1847, just months after Brigham Young's vanguard party.

Charles was a restless man. He left for the California gold fields in early 1849, married three wives over the course of his life, and fathered children with each. His first wife, Mary Hill, bore twelve children. His second, Mary Gray Pearson, bore one. His third, Louisa Cristiena Bischoff, bore twelve more, including Josephine. By the time Charles settled in the Salt River Valley, he was already in his seventies. The Crismon family was living in Lehi, Maricopa County, by 1880, when the area was still raw desert interrupted by irrigation ditches and adobe homesteads. Phoenix had been incorporated only in 1881. Mesa, founded by Mormon colonists in 1878, was a grid of dusty streets and canal laterals surrounded by creosote flats. The Crismons were among the families who built it.

Charles Crismon died in 1890 at the age of eighty-four. His name survives on streets and landmarks across the East Valley, a permanent record of the family's role in transforming the Sonoran Desert floor into farmland.

Danish-German Roots: The Bischoff Line

Josephine's mother, Louisa Cristiena Bischoff, was born on March 29, 1843, in Skive, a market town in the Viborg district of Denmark's Jutland peninsula. Her father, Christian Bishoff (1821-1875), came from a Danish-German family. Her mother, Johanne Marie Rasmussen (1815-1903), carried a common Danish surname that appears throughout the parish records of northern Jutland.

Louisa arrived in the Utah Territory around 1860, when she was sixteen. The Scandinavian pipeline to Zion was well established by then. LDS missionaries had been working Denmark since 1850, and the small country produced a disproportionate share of converts willing to emigrate. Between 1852 and 1890, roughly 25,000 Scandinavians crossed the Atlantic for Utah, many of them Danes. Louisa was part of that wave. She married Charles Crismon on May 10, 1862, in Salt Lake City. He was fifty-six; she was nineteen. The age gap was unremarkable in polygamist households where older patriarchs took younger wives, and Louisa bore twelve children across the next two decades. Josephine, her fifth child and twin to a brother named Joseph Benjamin, arrived on December 1, 1868.

Louisa outlived Charles by twenty-one years, dying in 1911 at the age of sixty-eight. The Danish-German line she carried forward merged, through Josephine, into the Ellsworth agricultural dynasty that would shape the East Valley for the next century.

Marriage to Louis Ellsworth

On February 20, 1889, in Lehi, Arizona Territory, twenty-year-old Josephine Louvina Crismon married Louis Ellsworth, the son of Edmund Lovell Ellsworth, captain of the first LDS handcart company. Louis was twenty-three, born in Salt Lake City in 1865, and had come to Arizona with his family in 1880.

Louis Ellsworth was building something extraordinary. In partnership with Dr. A.J. Chandler, the town founder, he assembled one of the largest ostrich operations in the American Southwest: more than a thousand birds on ranchland in the Salt River Valley. He exhibited his ostriches at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the Columbian Exposition that introduced millions of Americans to everything from the Ferris wheel to alternating current. He was also one of Arizona's first cotton producers. Josephine married into the center of the Territory's agricultural economy.

What this meant in daily terms was work. Ostrich farming demanded constant attention. The birds were aggressive, territorial, and expensive to feed. The eggs required careful incubation. The feathers had to be plucked, cleaned, sorted, and graded before shipping to milliners and dressmakers in New York, London, and Paris. Their eldest daughter, Anna Louvina, developed what the family genealogy described as "expert skill as a classer and processor of ostrich feathers." The Ellsworth household ran on the labor of the entire family.

Motherhood and Mesa

Between 1890 and 1911, Josephine bore eleven children: seven girls and four boys. The first, Anna Louvina, was born in Lehi. The remaining ten were born in Mesa as the family consolidated around Louis's expanding agricultural operations. Earl, the seventh child, arrived on February 11, 1903.

Mesa at the turn of the century was a town of a few hundred people, anchored by the Mormon temple block and radiating outward along irrigation canals fed by the Salt River. The completion of Roosevelt Dam in 1911 transformed the region, taming the unpredictable river and making large-scale irrigated farming reliable for the first time. Before the dam, a single dry year could wipe out a season's crops. After it, the desert bloomed with cotton, alfalfa, and citrus.

The ostrich feather market collapsed during the First World War. The automobile made elaborate plumed hats impractical. Wartime austerity killed the demand for luxury accessories. By 1914, the feathers that had made Louis wealthy were nearly worthless. The family pivoted to cotton, which boomed during the war years and into the 1920s. Josephine watched the family's livelihood transform twice in a single generation.

Then, on July 23, 1925, Louis was killed in a car accident near Whiteriver in Navajo County. The vehicle drifted too close to the road's edge, the shoulder gave way, and the car tumbled roughly a hundred feet down a hillside, rolling several times. Louis died of a fractured skull. His son Byron was seriously injured. A friend riding with them was thrown clear.

Josephine was fifty-six. She had eleven children, a dead husband, and a farm economy about to collapse in the Depression.

Later Years

She survived Louis by twenty-three years. She saw the Depression crush the cotton market that had replaced ostrich feathers. She saw her sons and grandsons leave for the Second World War. She saw Mesa grow from a farming village into a proper town. And she saw the next generation begin to take shape: her son Earl married Leona Dana in 1922, and their eldest daughter Earlene married Dr. Clifford James Goodman Sr. in 1940, uniting the Ellsworth agricultural line with the Goodman medical legacy.

Josephine Louvina Crismon Ellsworth died of coronary heart disease on January 23, 1948, in Mesa. She was seventy-nine years old. She was buried three days later in the Mesa Cemetery, the same ground where her husband Louis had been laid to rest in 1925. Three generations of transformation separated her birth in territorial Salt Lake City from her death in postwar Arizona: from handcart pioneers to ostrich feathers, from desert homesteads to irrigated farmland, from a polygamist patriarch's household to the grandmother of a medical dynasty.