Joseph Smith, the Founder and Prophet of Mormonism, Was Born Into an Impoverished and Itinerant Family in Vermont

A granite obelisk rises 38.5 feet above the dark green woods of Sharon, a small town on the White River in Vermont. Each foot represents a year in the life of Joseph Smith Jr., the progenitor, prophet and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who was born on that humble spot on December 23, 1805.

Smith was the son of tenant farmers. His parents, Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith, were from old New England families that had fallen on tough times, wrote historian Richard Bushman in Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling.

Smith’s mother grew up in gloomy circumstances, depressed by death and illness. She later wrote that she spent her adolescence “reading the Bible and praying” outside of an organized church.

While living in Turnbridge, Vermont, Lucy recalled, she became “acquainted with a young man by the name of Joseph Smith, to whom I was subsequently married” in 1796.

The couple’s first son died in childbirth. Alvin, their eldest, was born in 1798, and Hyrum two years later. The family moved to Sharon in 1804, onto farmland rented from Lucy’s father.

“We found ourselves quite comfortable again,” Lucy wrote. There, she and her husband had a third boy, whom they named after his father.

The Smiths’ life continued like this for a while. They moved itinerantly between small landholdings in Vermont—back to Turnbridge, to Royalton—then to Lebanon, New Hampshire, in 1811 and Palmyra, New York, in 1816.

In his autobiographical History of the Life of Joseph Smith, Smith described his childhood as full of “indigent circumstances.” He was sick with typhoid, almost had his leg amputated and spent ages 7 to 10 either in bed or hobbling around on crutches. His parents were “obliged to labor hard” to support the nine children they ultimately had. Although “deprived of the benefit of an education,” his were “goodly parents who spared no pains to instructing me in the Christian religion.”

In Palmyra, after all, religion was in the air. The construction of the Erie Canal, beginning in 1817, led to the economic and spiritual boom of the surrounding burned-over district. Religious groups, social reformers and utopians flowed to the canal zone, eager to integrate themselves in the new opportunities the waterway afforded.

Accounts from Smith and his mother place the family in the midst of a regional religious reckoning. Lucy described her son’s mind as “considerably troubled with regard to religion.” Smith himself wrote that he “pondered many things in my heart concerning the situation of the world of mankind.”

Smith said his religious visions began when he walked into the woods in the spring of 1820 to ask God which of the many, proliferating faiths he should join. “The Lord heard my cry in the wilderness,” Smith wrote, and told him not to join any established church. The young man believed he was a prophet.

According to Mormon belief, an angel named Moroni came to Smith on the night of September 21, 1823, and told the teenager about a set of golden plates recording the ancient, forgotten inhabitants of America. Smith later said he found them on a hill—known today as Hill Cumorah—near his father’s farm in Manchester, New York.

Four years later, after Smith’s marriage to Emma Hale, he reported that Moroni finally let him remove the gold plates and translate the strange engraved characters. He turned this guidance into the Book of Mormon, which he wrote in just 90 days and later published at the age of 24 in 1830.

Everyone but Smith’s family was surprised to learn Smith was starting a church. “The villagers had no idea that the nondescript farm boy who occasionally appeared in town to buy a paper for his father had any ambition or religious character,” Bushman wrote. But the movement was only just beginning—and it would take both Smith and the religion he founded far beyond their humble beginnings.

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.