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Ohio in the 1830s

In order to understand better the Ohio experience of the Latter-day Saints in the 1830s, one needs to examine social conditions and the setting of both the United States and the Western Reserve in that period. The rapid growth of the Church and the gathering of Latter-day Saints in northeastern Ohio during the 1830s, and the joys, struggles, and accomplishments they experienced there, coincided with a remarkable transformation in the young American republic. This was an era of significant increase, expansion, and concentration of the population. Modern political parties were taking shape. The Second Great Awakening, a powerful series of revivals in New England and frontier communities in Kentucky and Tennessee, was reaching a climax, and the religious vibrations of this revival combined with other forces to advance programs of humanitarian and moral reform. Meanwhile, a revolution in transportation was changing patterns of travel and communication, aiding the Latter-day Saint immigrants and missionaries.

An Era of Unusual Growth

During the threescore years preceding the American Civil War, the population of the United States almost doubled every twenty years. The five million in 1800 grew to more than nine million in 1820 and seventeen million in 1840. Although the number of immigrants arriving in the United States increased during the 1820s and 1830s, population growth during the first thirty years of the nineteenth century was due primarily to natural increase. Large families were common, and census reports of that period indicate that on the average, every household of free inhabitants had slightly more than five individuals.

While the growth along the eastern seaboard remained almost stationary, there was a remarkable increase in the land west of the Appalachians. During the first decade of the century the population of New York State had almost doubled, increasing from about one-half to one million inhabitants, with the most significant growth occurring in New York City and the western part of New York State. An almost identical increase occurred during the 1820s in Ohio, and between 1820 and 1830 there was almost a fourfold increase in Wisconsin, a threefold increase in Michigan, and a doubling of the population in Missouri, Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.

One of the remarkable changes was the rapid transformation of Ohio from a land of forests, dotted with Indian villages, to a region of mushrooming settlements. In 1800, three years before the territory became the sixteenth state, the population was approximately 72,000. By 1826 it had grown to 800,000, an increase that observers noted was "perhaps without a parallel in the history of this or any other country."

During the 1830s, the period of Mormon migration to Ohio, the state's population increased 581,564. Ohio had advanced from the thirteenth most populous state in 1810 to fifth in 1820, fourth in 1830. In 1840, only New York and Pennsylvania had more inhabitants than Ohio, and there were now as many people in Ohio as in the other states of the old Northwest (Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) combined.