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The Gathering to Ohio

While the young nation and the maturing state of Ohio changed rapidly, the lives of one group of Americans were transformed by the light of a new religion. Responding to the message of the restoration as unfolded by a latter-day prophet, Joseph Smith, these seekers after truth embraced a new guide to direct their lives. This influence was revelation; and at the beginning of the 1830s, this religious impact was most evident in Ohio and New York. Between the end of October 1830 and early June 1831, a period of less than eight months, this new religious movement was introduced into the Western Reserve; hundreds were converted to the faith; Kirtland, Ohio, became the headquarters of a church that was less than one year old; and, at the call of the prophet, several hundred settlers from New York gathered to Geauga County (which included the area now called Lake County) to help establish a new religious center in the United States.

The Transformation of a Community

The community where members of the newly restored Church settled, Kirtland, Ohio, had changed dramatically during the two decades preceding the introduction of the Church there. In 1820, nine years after the first permanent settlers constructed their log cabins in Kirtland, the population was enumerated at 481; during the next decade this number doubled to 1,018, consisting of 162 families, or an average of 6.3 individuals per family. Statistics, however, do not reflect the struggles and the satisfactions experienced by the pioneers as they built that community. Since much of the United States in the early nineteenth century was a vast untamed forest, many Americans gained practical experience and genuine dignity through hours of hard work, producing much of what they consumed. At least nine of the families who would join the Church in 1830 or early 1831 were among the pioneers who helped develop a civilization out of the Kirtland wilderness. The lessons that young and old alike learned while building homes, manufacturing household goods, planting and harvesting crops, and establishing local political institutions proved invaluable after these pioneers joined the Church and created new communities in Missouri, Illinois, and the Great Basin of western America.

A vivid description of the Kirtland wilderness was written by one of the first settlers of that region, Christopher Gore Crary, who arrived in Kirtland from Massachusetts in May 1811. "The forest-trees," he recalled, "were of endless variety and of the tallest kinds." Beneath the trees was a "thick growth of underbrush" interspersed with "flowers of rare beauty. . . . Birds of varied plumage filled the air with their music, and the air itself was fragrant and invigorating." For centuries, he added, this region had been the home of the Indians, "and surely their most vivid imagination could have portrayed nothing more desirable or delightful" than this "celestial" abode.