Louisa Busenbark, born on 25 May 1827, was a daughter of Isaac Busenbark and Abigail Manning. She came from German Jewish descent. Her people were well-to-do in New York, but they lost everything—friends, relatives, and money—when her father’s family joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Louisa was part of a large company of emigrants that reached the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. She came in company with her sister, Sarah Jane Busenbark Hall. Some where along the way, she married Edwin Calkins who enlisted in the Mormon Battalion, and was killed by Indians on his way home after he was released from service.
After her marriage to Asaph Rice in 1850, she and Asaph lived in Farmington, Utah, where some of their children were born. After Asaph’s marriage to Louisa’s sister Mary Busenbark in 1852, they all moved to North Ogden for a few years. They were among the first families in that locality. Louisa saw the Rice men folk help dig ditches, build the first meeting house in North Ogden, and went through real Indian problems brought on by a foolish white man.
Louisa and her children were hustled down south when Johnston’s Army came into Utah. She lived in a wagon box all summer while the men cleared land, cut ditches, and planted crops. Then all hands set out together to cut trees and build log cabins in a fort formation as a protection from the Indians.
Ten years later she was in another moving project–this time to St. George or Utah’s Dixie Land. In this day Louisa would have refused to move again, but she made no complaints. She was in a wagon train that numbered sixty wagons. Slowly and warily, they all went until they finally landed in Panaca, Nevada. Here Louisa Busenbark Calkins Rice died on 3 May 1885. She was buried beside her husband and was followed by her sister, his second wife.
Louisa never saw an electric light or a washing machine of any kind. She seldom rode in a carriage and never dreamed of a horseless carriage or an electric iron. If she could visit some of her granddaughters now, she would marvel at the life of common housewives today. And she would weep to find so many of them lukewarm in the Church of Jesus Christ for which she gave up so much just to be counted among the Children of God.
