Horace S. Eldredge

Horace S. Eldredge served as one of the Seven Presidents of Seventy, which was also designated as the First Council of the Seventy at that time. Later it would be called the Presidency of the Seventy.[1] He served from 1854 to his death in 1888.

Eldredge was born on February 6, 1816, in Brutus, New York. After his mother died when he was eight years old, his older sister and an aunt raised him. By age sixteen, he aligned himself with the Baptist church. After hearing the restored gospel of Jesus Christ in 1836, he was baptized.

He married Betsy Ann Chase in July 1836 and they had eight children. He later married Chloe Antoinette Redfield (in 1857) and they had eleven children.[2] He also had four other wives.[3]

He was appointed to serve a mission to New York to campaign for Joseph Smith’s candidacy for United States president.

Eldredge arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in September 1848 and was appointed marshal and tax assessor and collector for Utah Territory. He was also brigadier general of the Utah militia. He served in the Utah territorial legislature for two terms.

He was a businessman and held a goods and machinery company with W. H. Hooper for a time. He later opened a bank in Utah with Hooper and L. S. Hills. He was elected one of the directors of Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution in October 1868 and served as superintendent from November 1, 1876, to February 1, 1881; as vice president in January 1886; and again as superintendent in 1886. He helped organize the First National Bank of Ogden and served as its president.

Eldredge died on September 6, 1888.