The Grove That Isn't Marked

Something happens to people when they stand in the exact spot where an ordinary decision turned into something enormous. This month, that place is Palmyra.

The Sacred Grove, Palmyra, New York.

The grove floor is still wet from the night before, and a shaft of early light cuts sideways through new leaves, catching the dust the way it always does on a clear spring morning. A bird somewhere keeps up a single repeating note. Nothing about the spot marks it as different from the trees on either side. That's the point.

No plaque stands in the exact place. No stone marks the tree. Fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith never said precisely where he knelt in the spring of 1820, only that it was in the woods near his family's farm outside Palmyra, New York — so the Church has never tried to pin the location down. What visitors walk through today is simply the grove itself, left as an ordinary stand of maple and oak rather than built up into a monument. The forest is the artifact.

A few miles from that grove, in a three-story building on Palmyra's Main Street, the ordinary keeps colliding with the enormous. Egbert Grandin was twenty-three years old and ran a small print shop above a bookstore when Joseph Smith asked him to print 5,000 copies of the Book of Mormon. Grandin said no at first. Nobody in Palmyra believed the book was what Smith said it was, and printing it meant putting his own name on something the whole town considered a fraud. He agreed only after Martin Harris, a prosperous local farmer, mortgaged his entire farm to guarantee the $3,000 cost. Harris paid for more than paper and ink. His wife left him over the debt, and when the finished book failed to sell in a town that had already decided to hate it, he eventually lost the farm too.

Here's the part that's easy to miss: setting one page of the Book of Mormon by hand required about 2,500 separate pieces of metal type, each one placed by a compositor working twelve-hour days, six days a week, for eight months. When the book went on sale in March 1830 at a dollar seventy-five a copy, Palmyra refused to buy it. Missionaries had to carry the first copies out of town by hand to find anyone willing to read them.

The same neighborhood held an ordinary tragedy in the middle of all this. Alvin Smith, the oldest brother and the one steadily building his parents a new house, fell sick in November 1823 with what his mother called bilious colic. The doctor who came wasn't the family's usual one. He gave Alvin a heavy dose of calomel, a mercury compound that lodged in his stomach and killed him within days, at twenty-five. It happened two months after Joseph's first visit to the hill where he said an angel had shown him an ancient record buried in the ground.

The same year the printing finished, the Erie Canal had already been running through Palmyra for five years, carrying goods and travelers past the very shop where the presses ran, mule teams towing flat-bottomed boats loaded with wheat and lumber at a walking pace, day and night. A technology built to move grain and lumber faster than any road could also carried something else out of a small print shop nobody outside the county had heard of, into a country that eventually would.

By the time the group reaches Hill Cumorah, the light is doing what it does at the end of a June evening in upstate New York — going low and gold across a low, unremarkable hill that looks like a hundred other hills nearby. It looks like nothing in particular, the same quiet, easy-to-miss ordinariness that made a fourteen-year-old's grove worth walking past if you didn't already know what happened there.