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Preface

Every age has its challenges, its confrontations, its opportunities, and its significant developments. The decade of the 1830s was no exception. This formative era saw an extension of the foundations of a new religious movement that emerged from a series of sacred events beginning in the spring of 1820.

The founder of this new faith, Joseph Smith, was born in Vermont in 1805. His family settled in the Finger Lakes region of western New York in 1816. A quest to secure a remission of sins led the youth to investigate churches in the area where he lived, and after perceiving that the religious leaders were teaching conflicting doctrines, he decided that none of the faiths could be right. While engaged in this quest to determine religious truth, Joseph decided to ask God in prayer which church he should join. In the spring of 1820, at the age of fourteen, he went to a grove near his family's log cabin home at Manchester, New York, and knelt in prayer. Suddenly he beheld a vision, as two glorious personages-God the Father and His beloved Son, Jesus Christ-appeared to him. Joseph was told that the religious denominations taught incorrect doctrines and that he should not join any of them. He was also promised that at some future time, the fulness of the gospel would be revealed to him.

Other visions and revelations followed this first vision. In the fall of 1823 Joseph was directed by an angel named Moroni to go to a hill near his home. There he found, in a stone box, a set of metallic plates containing curious inscriptions. Four years later he removed the plates and commenced to translate them, through the gift and power of God. The record engraven on the plates described the religious history of early inhabitants of the American continent, including a visitation of the Resurrected Christ. In March 1830 this record was published as the Book of Mormon.

While this record-a new witness for Christ-was being translated, Joseph Smith and one of his associates, Oliver Cowdery, received from angelic messengers the priesthood, which they learned is the power and authority to act in the name of God.

On April 6, 1830, in Fayette, New York, Joseph Smith organized the restored Church of Christ, or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as it was later called. That summer and fall, missionaries were sent out to surrounding regions and states to proclaim the restored gospel. Shortly after they introduced their message in Ohio in October 1830, the migration of Latter-day Saints to that area commenced. The following summer members also began gathering in a second location, western Missouri. Thus, during the 1830s there were two gathering places for the Latter-day Saints, Ohio and Missouri. While more members of the Church gathered in Missouri than Ohio during that decade, Joseph Smith, their prophet, lived in Ohio during most of that period, and in large measure the headquarters of the Church was located where he resided.