Table of Content
Significantly, the Smith family lived in this log home during the time of the First Vision and visits from the angel Moroni informing Joseph, Jr., regarding the coming forth of the Book of Mormon on the night of September 21-22, 1823. Not long after the Smiths moved into the log home, situated a few hundred feet to the north, they contracted to purchase an additional 100 acres adjoining their 80 acre farm. Alvin determined to build a home where his parents could enjoy their family in their later years and to repay them for all of their love, toil, and sacrifice in behalf of their children. Sadly, before Alvin could finish this more spacious frame home, he died on November 19, 1823, while the Smiths still resided in the log home. He passed away just a few months after Moroni had appeared to his younger brother. The Mormons toil on the large stone building from 1833 until 1836, dedicating one day out of seven to its construction.
During the temple's consecration, hundreds report seeing angels and other miraculous visions. As Smith's Church of Christ grows, he finds himself under greater scrutiny from local authorities and residents. Sidney Rigdon, an Ohio preacher who learns of Smith's religion through missionaries, embraces Smith as a new prophet and urges the New York group to migrate to Ohio. In January 1831, Smith leads his family and about seventy-five followers west to Kirtland, Ohio. ; Smith (1853, p. 82)); however, Lucy's history also indicates that after the appearance of the angel, Joseph had made two annual visits to the hill Cumorah before the 1823 death of her son Alvin (Smith 1853, p. 85), which Lucy incorrectly dated to 1824 (Smith 1853, p. 87).
American Experience
According to Smith, the angel prevented him from taking the plates in 1823, telling him to come back in exactly a year. Smith made annual visits to the hill over the next three years, reporting to his family that he had not yet been allowed to take the plates. Smith was born in Sharon, Vermont, the fifth of eleven children born to Joseph and Lucy Mack Smith. By 1817, Smith's family had moved to the "burned-over district" of western New York, an area repeatedly swept by religious revivals during the Second Great Awakening. Smith family members held divergent views about organized religion, believed in visions and prophecies, and engaged in certain folk religious practices typical of the era. Smith briefly investigated Methodism, but he was generally disillusioned with the churches of his day.
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".
Joseph Smith, Jr.'s 1842 Account of Angel Moroni's Visit
Following the Missouri Compromise of 1820, slavery is legal in the state, but the dispute over extending slavery to new territories is intense. "They came, men, women, and children, in every conceivable manner," according to one history of the area, "some with horses, oxen and vehicles rough and rude. while others had walked..." Soon after publishingThe Book of Mormonin 1830, Joseph Smith left his home in Palmyra, New York with several dozen followers. Over the next fifteen years, Smith's Latter-day Saints would travel beyond the boundaries of the United States as they searched for a permanent place to call home. By the time church faithful laid down the foundation for a temple in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, in Mexican territory, Smith was dead and his followers, though now more numerous, had been forced out of communities across the American continent. Bushman (2005, pp. 40–41) "The preacher reacted quickly and negatively, not because of the strangeness of the story but because of its familiarity. Subjects of revivals all to often claimed to have seen visions."
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.
RELIGIOUS CLIMATE
The Smith family lived here for less than five years, from 1825 to the spring of 1829. During that time the Prophet Joseph Smith continued to be tutored and prepared to receive the Book of Mormon plates. It was to this home that the Prophet brought the Book of Mormon plates after he received them on from the Hill Cumorah on September 22, 1827. Months after settling in Ohio, Joseph Smith declares that Independence Missouri was the site of the Garden of Eden and will become a "New Jerusalem." Missionaries there establish a printing press and publish the westernmost American newspaper,The Evening and Morning Star. Smith's revelations -- many printed in the paper -- stress that Mormons are entitled to their land and should secure it by force if necessary. The money provided by Harris was enough to pay all of Smith's debts in Palmyra, and for him to travel with Emma and all of their belongings to Harmony Township, Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, where they would be able to avoid the public commotion in Palmyra over the plates.
In the family room, the Smiths kept the plates in a chest, shown on the dresser to the right. No names peculiar to the Book of Mormon have ever been found in New World inscriptions. No genuine inscriptions have ever been found in Egyptian or anything similar which could correspond to the "reformed Egyptian tongue." No ancient copies of the Book of Mormon have ever been found.
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.
Smith's close friend Joseph Knight Sr. corroborates the requirement that Smith was to "take the Book and go right away". According to Smith's mother, the angel forbade him to put the plates on the ground until they were under lock and key. He was, however, according to a retelling of an account by Smith Sr., allowed to put down the plates on a napkin he was to bring with him for that purpose.
Thus, on September 22, 1823, a day listed in local almanacs as the autumn equinox, Smith said that he went to a prominent hill near his home, and found the location of the artifacts. There are varying accounts as to how Smith reportedly found the precise location of the golden plates. In 1838, Smith stated that this location was shown to him in a vision while he conversed with Moroni. This conforms to an account by Smith's friend Joseph Knight Sr., though he refers to Smith's guide only as "the personage." However, according to a Palmyra resident Henry Harris, Smith told him he located the plates using his seer stone. In yet another account, the angel required Smith to follow a sequence of landmarks until he arrived at the correct location.
Smith’s new “church” was extremely controversial and contained a blend of the Christian doctrines and folk magic with which he grew up. He attempted to convert some of the local people, but was driven out of various towns for “corrupting public morals” with his practices of divination and polygamy . The polygamy charge is uncertain, as both Smith and his wife Emma denied any polygamous relationships, but some records show that Smith had married four other women.
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