author
Adelia B. Cox Sidwell
1841–1925
A Utah pioneer writer, she preserved family and frontier history in a warm, firsthand way. Her best-known work centers on the life of her father, Orville Southerland Cox, and opens a window onto early Mormon settlement in the American West.
1 Audiobook
Orville Southerland Cox, Pioneer of 1847
by Adelia B. Cox Sidwell
About the author
Born in 1841, Adelia B. Cox Sidwell was an American writer and Utah pioneer remembered for recording the lives and memories of early Latter-day Saint settlers. Sources about her connect her with Manti, Utah, and identify her as the daughter of Orville Southerland Cox, whose life became the subject of her best-known book.
Her principal surviving work is Biographical Sketch of Orville Southerland Cox, Pioneer of 1847, published in Manti in 1913. The book blends family history, pioneer experience, and local memory, helping preserve details of westward migration and frontier settlement that might otherwise have been lost.
Other records also point to her as the author of reminiscences about early Manti and South Sanpete, suggesting a broader role as a keeper of community history. She died in 1925, and her writing remains of interest to readers drawn to memoir, regional history, and firsthand accounts of the nineteenth-century American West.