BLYTHEWOOD – Approximately 100 students from Blythewood, Fairfield County and surrounding areas who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) will participate next week in a trek, simulating a trip on foot that members of the church made across the country in 1848 to reach the Utah Valley.
The students will push and pull hand carts, dressed in period clothing, and with all their belongings in a five-gallon bucket. For three days, they will trek 10 miles across and around Farewell Farm, a 200-acre horse farm in Blythewood. The farm is owned by church member Joyce Hampton Hill.
The students will depart from the corner of Old Birch and Persimmon Fork Roads at noon on Thursday, June 13, and will finish at noon on Saturday.
The students are divided into family units, carrying pretend babies who represented and were named after actual babies who made the trip with their families.
At the end of the trek, those dolls representing real babies who died on the long-ago journey, will be buried in a solemn funeral ceremony near the temple the students erected.
The symbolic trek is organized every four years so that every LDS student makes the trek during high school.
