Peter Fagg: Well this is Hill Farm, the home of John and Jane Benbow. As church members, we sometimes call it Benbow's Farm, but it's always been Hill Farm. They had 300 acres of land. They had fish ponds out the back. They had dove coats up the top here and it was to here that Wilford Woodruff arrived on the 3rd of March, 1840.

Louise Manning: I live in the house where John and Jane Benbow lived. They were tenant farmers.

PF: Here he found that John and Jane were members of a group called the United Brethren, 600 strong. They met in multiple places around this area, and it was here that he began to preach to them. After two days, John and Jane and four other preachers of the United Brethren accept them and are taken down and baptized and that begins the succession of conversions, totalling between 1,500 to 1,800 just in those first eight months.

LM: Even today, it's still really amazing that they sold everything they had and decided that they were going to go off onto a new life. That takes real bravery.

PF: There was one event here that always makes me kind of smile. One Sabbath, Wilford is preaching here. He actually preaches on three occasions and combined those meetings had about a thousand people. The same day, the local Church of England recorded 15 people in attendance and on the last of those meetings, the minister sends a constable down to arrest Wilford Woodruff. At that time, your place had to be licensed and your minister had to be licensed as well.

So the constable arrives here, goes to arrest Wilford Woodruff, and he says, "Well, actually I'm licensed." They had learnt that in the 1837 mission that they had to get a license, "but if you wanna sit down and listen, I'll talk to you afterwards." At the end of that sermon, the constable comes up and says, "That's the best sermon I've ever heard," and offers himself for baptism.

The constable returned to the minster and said that, "he's legal, I'm not touching him." After that, not to be outdone, the minister then sent two of his clerks down to come and spy on this menace, and they accepted and were baptized as well. He didn't send anybody else

However, what he did do is gang up with some other ministers here. They sent a petition to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Wilford Woodruff records in his journal and says that the archbishop responded with very wise words. He said, "If you spent less time worrying about the hares and the hounds and more time worrying about your parishioners than maybe this wouldn't have happened." So from our perspective, it's a very funny catalog of errors. I don't think the minister probably saw it in the same light.

LM: Wilford Woodruff spent time in my home and I think for many to see where their ancestors have come from is really, really important and to see what their ancestors went through so that they could have a better life.

PF: Well, they went on then to have multiple baptisms here. Wilford alone records about 117 baptisms taking place down in the ponds.