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Smith stated that the retelling of his vision story "excited a great deal of prejudice against me among professors of religion, and was the cause of great persecution, which continued to increase". Tales of visions and theophanies, however, were not unusual at the time, though the clergy of many organized religions often resisted the stories. Early prejudice against Smith may have taken place by clergy, but there is no contemporary record of this.[original research? ] The bulk of Smith's persecution seems to have arisen among laity, and not because of his First Vision, but because of his later assertion to have discovered the golden plates in a hill near his home; the statement was widely publicized and ridiculed in local newspapers beginning around 1827.
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
Thus, in early October 1827, they moved to Harmony, with the glass box reportedly holding the plates hidden during the trip in a barrel of beans. An 1841 engraving of "Mormon Hill" , where Smith said he found the golden plates on the west side, near the peak. After the messenger departed, Smith said he had two more encounters with him that night and an additional one the next morning, after which he told his father and soon thereafter the rest of his family, who believed his story, but generally kept it within the family. He said there was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the source from whence they sprang. He also said that the fulness of the everlasting Gospel was contained in it, as delivered by the Savior to the ancient inhabitants; also that there were two stones in silver bows—and these stones, fastened to a breastplate, constituted what is called the Urim and Thummim—deposited with the plates". From about 1819, Smith regularly practiced scrying, a form of divination in which a "seer" looked into a seer stone to receive supernatural knowledge.
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.
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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".
Therefore, Smith sent his mother to the home of Martin Harris, a local landowner said at the time to be worth about $8,000 to $10,000. Over the next few days, Smith took a well-digging job in nearby Macedon to obtain money to buy a solid lockable chest in which he said he would put the plates. By then, however, some of Smith's treasure-seeking company had heard that Smith was successful in obtaining the plates, and they wanted what they believed was their cut of the profits from what they saw as part of their joint venture. When Emma heard of this, she went to Macedon and informed Smith Jr., who reportedly determined through his Urim and Thummim that the plates were safe, but nevertheless he hurriedly traveled home by horseback. Once home in Palmyra, he then walked to Cumorah and said he removed the plates from their hiding place, and walked back home with the plates wrapped in a linen frock under his arm, suffering a dislocated thumb as he fended off attackers.
Swathed in the rustic smells of old pine wood, take a journey through time in the beautiful Smith Family Log Home.
Smith says he was led to the plates and instructed by an angel, Moroni, in a series of visions. An early review in theRochester Daily AdvertiserdeclaresThe Book of Mormonto be "an evidence of fraud, blasphemy, and credulity, shocking both to Christians and moralists." Within weeks, however, Smith's new church has attracted forty members. Joseph Smith's intention was to keep the box reportedly containing the golden plates safe from his Palmyra neighbors while he dictated a translation of the book's reputed contents, which he would then publish. To do so, however, he needed an investment of money, and at the time he was penniless.
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 Family Farm
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.
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.
Like his father, the younger Smith reportedly had his own set of visions, the first of which occurred in the early 1820s when Smith was in his early teens and is called by Latter Day Saints the First Vision. The first description of this event was not published until 1832, which said the event occurred in 1821; however, most accounts date the event to the year 1820. The details of the theophany have varied as the story was retold throughout Smith's life.
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.
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.
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