3 Log House of Joseph Smith Sr.

Table of Content

• Joseph Sr. and Lucy Smith Log Home: Palmyra, New York
• Other Articles In This Series On Mormonism:
• Swathed in the rustic smells of old pine wood, take a journey through time in the beautiful Smith Family Log Home.
• Smith Family Farm
• American Experience
• Joseph Smith, Jr.'s 1838 Account of Angel Moroni's Visit
• Palmyra Township, New York

Rising from humble beginnings in the 1830s, the church now counts twelve million members worldwide. The story of the polio crusade pays tribute to a time when Americans banded together to conquer a terrible disease. The medical breakthrough saved countless lives and had a pervasive impact on American philanthropy that continues to be felt today.

Smith agreed to take the job of assisting Stowell and Hale, and he and his father worked with the Stowell-Hale team for approximately one month, attempting, according to their contract, to locate "a valuable mine of either Gold or Silver and also...coined money and bars or ingots of Gold or Silver". Smith boarded with an Isaac Hale , and fell in love with Isaac Hale's daughter Emma, a schoolteacher he would later marry in 1827. Isaac Hale, however, disapproved of their relationship and of Smith in general.

Joseph Sr. and Lucy Smith Log Home: Palmyra, New York

Smith usually practiced crystal gazing by putting a stone at the bottom of a white stovepipe hat, putting his face over the hat to block the light, then divining information from the stone. Smith and his father achieved "something of a mysterious local reputation in the profession—mysterious because there is no record that they ever found anything despite the readiness of some local residents to pay for their efforts." Smith said he had become concerned about religion "at about the age of twelve years," although later he seems to have wondered whether "a Supreme being did exist." Smith apparently attended the Presbyterian Sunday school as a child, and later as an adolescent, he displayed interest in Methodism. One of Smith's acquaintances said that Smith had caught "a spark of Methodism" at camp meetings "away down in the woods, on the Vienna road." He even reportedly spoke during some of these meetings, and the acquaintance described Smith as a "very passable exhorter." The artists visited Palmyra in December 2019 to experience the sites and capture details they wanted to reflect in the paintings. In order to begin to understand and properly appreciate Joseph Smith’s First Vision, it is advisable to first explore some of its background and underlying themes.

When Martin did not return to Harmony, Pennsylvania, where Joseph and Emma lived at the time, Joseph traveled to Palmyra to inquire the reason for Martin Harris’ delayed return. Word was sent to the Harris home that Joseph needed to speak with Martin immediately. Hours passed before Martin entered the Smith home, where he sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands avoiding eye contact with Joseph. ” When Martin informed Joseph that he had lost the manuscript, Lucy Mack Smith said that Joseph clinched his hands together and exclaimed, “All is lost, is lost! It is I who tempted the wrath of God by asking him for that which I had no right to ask, as I was differently instructed by the angel.” And he wept and groaned, walking the floor continually.

Other Articles In This Series On Mormonism:

Later, Smith reportedly determined by looking into his seer stone that the "right person" was Emma Hale Smith, his future wife. There is no specific record of Smith seeing the angel in 1826, however, after Joseph and Emma were married on January 18, 1827, Smith returned to Manchester, and as he passed by Cumorah, he said he was chastised by the angel for not being "engaged enough in the work of the Lord". He was reportedly told that the next annual meeting was his last chance to get the plates and the Urim and Thummim. Lucy's account, recorded thirty years after the period in which the visions are said to have occurred, suggests "a tendency to make her husband the predecessor of her son" by echoing passages in the Book of Mormon. According to an account by Willard Chase, the angel gave Smith a strict set of "commandments" which he was to follow in order to obtain the plates. Among these requirements, according to Chase, was that Smith must approach the site "dressed in black clothes, and riding a black horse with a switch tail, and demand the book in a certain name, and after obtaining it, he must go directly away, and neither lay it down nor look behind him".

A number of family members fell ill, and Joseph experienced a common complication whereby typhoid bacteria infected bone, in Smith's case, the shin bone. After the typically horrific early nineteenth-century surgery without either anesthetic or antiseptic, Smith eventually recovered, though he used crutches for several years and had a slight limp for the remainder of his life. The painting of Joseph Smith bringing home the gold plates from the Hill Cumorah portrays the involvement of his family, West said.

Swathed in the rustic smells of old pine wood, take a journey through time in the beautiful Smith Family Log Home.

Three days later, a raiding party massacres church members, including children, at Haun's Mill, The Mormon community leaves Missouri for Illinois. Non-Mormons fear that the Mormons, who have formed a militia, will take their land. And although Smith's church officially supports slavery, other Missourians also oppose some Mormons' abolitionist sentiments.

Biographer Fawn Brodie wrote, "He was a gregarious, cheerful, imaginative youth, born to leadership, but hampered by meager education and grinding poverty." When Smith arrived at the place where the plates were supposed to be, he reportedly took the plates from the stone box they were in and set them down on the ground nearby, looking to see if there were other items in the box that would "be of some pecuniary advantage to him". When he turned around, however, the plates were said to have disappeared into the box, which was then closed. When Smith attempted to get the plates back out of the box, the angel hurled him back to the ground with a violent force (id.). After three failed attempts to retrieve the plates, the angel told him that he could not have them then, because he "had been tempted of the advisary and saught the Plates to obtain riches and kept not the commandments that I should have".

Joseph Smith Sr., his wife Lucy Mack Smith, and some of their children moved from Norwich, Vermont, to Palmyra, New York, in 1816. In 1818 or 1819, the family built a log home near property owned by the estate of Nicholas Evertson of New York City, but did not enter a purchase agreement for the land until a land agent had been appointed in 1820. Smith, Sr. agreed to pay the Evertson estate between $600 and 700 for the 100-acre (0.4 km2) farm. In 1825, the family moved into a larger and more comfortable frame home that they had built on the property but were unable to make payments on the land. A carpenter who had completed the house sued the Smiths for his costs in February 1825.

A new agent for the Evertson estate also foreclosed on them, although a sympathetic Quaker, Lemuel Durfee, purchased the farm and permitted the family to rent the frame house until they returned to the log home in the spring of 1829. On March 26, 1830, Joseph Smith publishes the first edition ofThe Book of Mormon. The book is a translation of golden plates that Smith reports to have dug up in surrounding hills.

The economic order, like those of many communistic societies of the era, requires church members to give their property to the church for redistribution. Shortly after the Erie Canal opens in 1825, upstate New York is still a sparsely populated, rugged frontier. The area will later be called the "Burned-Over District" -- burned over by endless religious revivals during this era of spiritual seeking.

Joseph Smith Sr. confessed in 1834, "I have not always set that example before my family that I ought." Later, Joseph Smith Sr. told Hyrum he had "been out of the way through wine." Bushman (2005, p. 42) (noting that Smith's drinking was not excessive for the time and place). Vogel frankly calls Smith Sr.'s difficulty "low self-esteem and alcoholism."Vogel (2004, p. xx). An 1893 engraving of Joseph Smith receiving the golden plates and the Urim and Thummim from Moroni.

When their creditor foreclosed, the family persuaded a local Quaker, Lemuel Durfee, to buy the farm and rent it to them. Nevertheless, in 1829, the Smiths and five of their children moved back into the log house, with Hyrum Smith and his wife. Harris had apparently been a close confidant of the Smith family since at least 1826, and he may have heard about Smith's attempts to obtain the plates from the angel even earlier from Smith Sr. When Lucy visited Harris, he had heard about Smith's report to have found golden plates through the grapevine in Palmyra, and was interested in finding out more.