The Wooden Sisters

In the autumn of 1720, a Saxon woodcarver named Johann Albrecht sold two maple dolls from a market stall in Cheapside, London — one to a Scottish linen merchant, one to a sea merchant's daughter. The dolls were separated before the morning was out. They would not be reunited for two hundred and nine years.

Elizabeth traveled with the Pollock family — from Glasgow to County Tyrone, across the Atlantic during the Irish famine, over the frozen Mississippi, and across the Continental Divide to the Utah Territory.

Rebecca went with the Stevenses — from New London to the Mohawk Valley, to Winter Quarters, to the Salt Lake Valley, and into the desert settlements of pioneer Utah.

Together they witnessed the exodus from Nauvoo, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the Castle Gate mine disaster, and the long ordinary work of two families building lives in the American West — until the autumn of 1929, when De Pollock met Nedra Stevens in Salt Lake City, looked at the doll she carried, and said: the wooden sisters.