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M I S S O U L A I N S T I T U T E O F R E L I G I O N

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Joseph Smith‟s New England Heritage

Birthplace of Joseph Smith

The birthplace of Joseph Smith wasSharon township, Vermont. The granitememorial to Joseph Smith was erectedand the site dedicated on 23 December1905 by President Joseph F. Smith incommemoration of the centennial of theProphet‟s birth.

The monument is 38 1/2 feet high, onefoot for each year of his life. TheMemorial Cottage (immediately left of the monument), which was used as avisitors‟ center, was completed anddedicated at the same time as themonument.

Paternal Ancestry of Joseph Smith

Smith Family Marker

The Smith family marker in Pine Grove Cemetery Topsfield, Massachusetts. Buried here are Samuel Smith; his wife, Rebecca; Samuel II; and his wife, Priscilla Gould. George A. Smith helped erect the monument to his ancestors in 1873.

Topsfield, Massachusettes

Five generations of the Smith family lived in Topsfield: Robert Smith, Samuel Smith I, Samuel Smith II, Asael Smith, and Joseph Smith, Sr. Joseph Smith, Sr., was born in this house on 12 July 1771. The home was torn down in 1875.

Asael Smith Statements

In an address to his family, Asael wrote:

“The soul is immortal. . . . Do all to God in a serious manner. When you think of him, speak of him, pray to him, or in any way make your addresses to his great majesty, be in good earnest. . . . And as to religion, study the nature of religion, and see whether it consists in outward formalities, or in the hidden man of the heart. . . . “Sure I am my Savior, Christ, is perfect, and never will fail in one circumstance. To him I commit your souls, bodies, estates, names, characters, lives, deaths and all—and myself, waiting when he shall change my vile body and make it like his own glorious body.”

Asael Smith also predicted that:“God was going to raise up some branch of his family to be a great benefit to mankind.”

Richard Lloyd Anderson, Joseph Smith’s New England Heritage (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1971)

Maternal Ancestry of Joseph Smith

“After this I determined to follow phantoms no longer, but devote the rest of my life to the service of God and my family.”

Solomon believed that Lydia not only exhibited “the polish of education, but she also possessed that inestimable jewel which in a wife and mother of a family is truly a pearl of great price, namely, a pious and devotional character.”

Religious Culture of Smith Family

“It would be hard to place the Smiths in any one religious tradition. The family‟s religious culture was too eclectic. Smith and Mack relatives comprised an inventory of late-eighteenth-century alternatives. Joseph Sr.‟s dreams linked him to radical Protestantism with its taste for spiritual manifestations. Solomon Mack underwent a classic evangelical conversion at the end of his life. Lucy‟s crisis in 1803 took the same form.”

Religious Culture of Smith Family

“Her brother Jason was a seeker. Asael‟sUniversalism was a form of vernacular rationalism, an offspring of the Enlightenment. Asael used Thomas Paine‟s Age of Reason to quash Joseph Sr.‟s flirtation with Methodism. Possibly in Vermont and certainly later in New York, Joseph Sr. was involved in magical practices, an unorthodox but not unusual way of connecting with the supernatural.”

Religious Culture of Smith Family

“The Smiths were exposed to a conglomeration of doctrines and attitudes, some imported from Europe, others springing up in New England, none sorted or ranked by recognized authority, all available for adoption as personal whim or circumstances dictated. The result was a religious melee.”

Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, p. 26.

Parents of the Prophet

This is Tunbridge’s general store. It was still in use after 160 years. Traditionally, it is the place Joseph, Sr., and Lucy first met.

Tunbridge Gore, Vermont, was the first home of Joseph and Lucy Smith. Hyrum

Smith was born here on 9 February 1800.

Lucy Mack

“I made a solemn covenant with God that if He would let me live I would endeavor to serve him according to the best of my abilities. Shortly after this I heard a voice say to me, „Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. Let your heart be comforted; ye believe in God, believe also in me. . . . As soon as I was able I made all diligence in endeavoring to find someone who was capable of instructing me more perfectly in the way of life and salvation. . . I went from place to place for the purpose of getting information and finding, if it were possible, some congenial spirit who could enter into my feelings and thus be able to strengthen and assist me in carrying out my resolutions. . . . I said in my heart that there was not then upon earth the religion which I sought. I therefore determined to examine my Bible and, taking Jesus and His disciples for my guide, to endeavor to obtain from God that which man could neither give nor take away. . . At length I considered it my duty to be baptized and, finding a minister who was willing to baptize me and leave me free in regard to joining any religious denomination, I stepped forward and yielded obedience to this ordinance.”

Tunbridge, Vermont

The Joseph Smith, Sr., family moved several times in New England. (1) Following Joseph and Lucy’s marriage in 1796 they lived and farmed in Tunbridge, Vermont. (2) In 1802 they moved to Randolph and opened a mercantile establishment. (3) The next year they returned to Tunbridge. (4) Also in 1803, they sold the Tunbridge farm and moved to Royalton for a few months. (5) In 1804 they moved to Sharon township in Windsor County, where Joseph Smith, Jr., was born. (6) They moved back to Tunbridge, where Samuel Harrison was born. (7) In 1808 they again moved to Royalton, where Ephraim and William were born. (8) In 1811 they moved to West Lebanon, New Hampshire, where a typhoid epidemic struck the family. (9) In 1813 they moved to Norwich, Vermont, where they experienced three successive crop failures. (10) Crop failures forced a final move to the Palmyra vicinity in New York in 1816.

Sharon, Windsor, Vermont

Joseph Smith was born in the township of Sharon in Windsor County, Vermont. This should not be confused with the village of Sharon southeast of the Smith farm. As the map shows, the farm was on the township line.

Children of Joseph and Lucy

Joseph Smith‟s Early Boyhood

Nathan Smith, one of young Joseph Smith’s physicians.

Mt. Tambora

A similar phenomenon occurred in April of 1815 with the cataclysmic eruption of Tambora Volcano in Indonesia, the most powerful eruption in recorded history. Tambora's volcanic cloud lowered global temperatures by as much as 3 degrees °C. Even a year after the eruption, most of the northern hemisphere experienced sharply cooler temperatures during the summer months. In parts of Europe and in North America, 1816 was known as “the year without a summer."

Move to Palmyra

The Appalachian Mountains formed a formidable barrier to western migration in the early history of the United States. Explorers eventually found three tolerable routes from the tidewater to the interior: the Great Genesee Road‟s Mohawk Turnpike in New York; the National Road in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Ohio; and the Wilderness Road in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The Smith family used the first of these routes to travel to the Palmyra, New York, region. The path came out of New England in Massachusetts to Albany in eastern New York and up the Mohawk River valley.

Influence of New England on Joseph

New England families linked to the Restoration

Patriotic, socially responsible, and religious

Puritanism, frugality, resourcefulness

Emphasis on education

Theocratic society

Influence of New England on Joseph

Brigham Young said of Joseph Smith:

“It was decreed in the counsels of eternity, long before the foundations of the earth were laid, that he should be the man, in the last dispensation of this world, to bring forth the word of God to the people, and receive the fulness of the keys and power of the Priesthood of the Son of God. The Lord had his eye upon him, and upon his father, and upon his father‟s father, and upon their progenitors clear back to Abraham, and from Abraham to the flood, from the flood to Enoch, and from Enoch to Adam. He has watched that family and that blood as it has circulated from its fountain to the birth of that man. He was foreordained in eternity to preside over this last dispensation.”

Next Week

Chapter 3 The First Vision

Chapter 4 A Period of Preparation