Elder Charles L. Foote, born in Nevada's Valley of Fire  on 11 November 1868 in what is now the ghost town of St. Thomas, which has only recently reemerged from the receding waters of Lake Mead. At some point, the family relocated to Utah's Emery County, where in 1897 he was married to Johanne Martine Katrine Andersen, known to all as "Hannah." By the time he was called to carry-out a mission by the Church in March of 1906, Foote was nearly forty years of age, his wife thirty-two, and the couple had five children. Despite the hardship this would have posed to the family, he accepted the call, and set out in December of that year for Chattanooga, arriving at the Southern States Mission Headquarters on the ninth. On the fourteenth, Mission President, Ben E. Rich, assigned Foote to the Florida Conference. The next day, he left on the first train out of Chattannooga, and over the next two days stopped at Atlanta, and Jesup (Wayne County, Georgia) before arriving at the Mission House in Jacksonville on the sixteenth, two days before the Florida Conference would convene to assign elders to their fields of labor. He was first assigned to the Tampa area, where he worked for the next six months.

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