George Washington Sevy, Jr. was born February 25, 1832, in Leroy, Genesee County, New York, to George Washington Sevey and Hannah Libby. As a grown man, he stood about five feet eleven inches tall, of medium build, leaning a little toward the slender side. He had blue eyes, a heavy shock of dark hair, with a rather swarthy complexion and a luxurious beard, rounded just a mite on the end. Many people described him as a handsome man, but whether or not he was, he did have a magnetic personality; he had many friends, and was a friend in return.

It might be well to mention a few of the many vocations and avocations at which he was indeed successful. Although he had had only about six months of actual formal schooling, he seemed to have been a college graduate. His writing was truly legible and his leadership qualifications were outstanding. He was good at making brooms, shoes, farming, stock raising (cattle, sheep, pigs, horses, and chickens), freighting, mining, peddling, merchandising, operating harvest machinery, building dams, canals, roads, land promoting, saw milling, threshing, railroad grading, constructing reservoirs, dairying and he had the magical green thumb-anything he planted grew. He was a master woodsman—few men could compete with him and his axe. He was a person of the highest moral character; his every act was directed toward the inner circle of his prescribed ethical and religious standards.

He emigrated to the west in a company of gold-seekers enroute to California, arriving in Utah about 1849. He then procured a job, intending to work until winter was over, then proceed on to the coast. However, he took up with the Mormons and remained with them, going from Salt Lake City, to Spanish Fork.

"A miracle converted me," confessed Bishop Sevy in one of his rare sermon ventures, "but it has not taken a miracle to keep me converted. The testimony it left with me is my choicest possession and burns ever brighter as the days pass.

"I left my home to take part in the gold rush to California in ’49. Had my job as teamster for a party of goldseekers held out, I would probably be there today among the discouraged and abandoned miners that fill the state. But the Lord intervened in a way that was hard to take at the time. I fell so sick that I could not continue with my party, nor could they wait for me to get well. They left me at a wayside camp, and pushed on without me. I probably would have died, but a following party picked me up and carried me with them to Utah."