I was staying with some friends at a Vermont inn in November, some years ago, when inspiration struck me out of nowhere. In the form of a 38.5-foot-tall granite obelisk.
Idling in the inn’s lobby one evening, I discovered a pamphlet touting the birthplace of Joseph Smith. The Prophet of the Latter-Day Saints and translator of the Book of Mormon had indeed been born just down the road from this inn, in a tiny hamlet in rural Vermont.
At dinner, I proposed this side trip to our group. Only one person, my friend Marie, agreed to accompany me. And only if I promised her that we would rejoin the rest of the group at a local microbrewery directly afterward.
I’d actually known that Joseph Smith was born near Sharon, Vermont — but I’d forgotten that fact because it seemed insignificant even in the historian Fawn Brodie’s masterful biography of the Mormon prophet, No Man Knows My History. As a result, I wasn’t sure how strongly the LDS Church was invested in the Smith birth-site. I’d never heard Saints describe their own trips to the place — although of course I’d never thought to ask them, either. And I did recall that the Smith family themselves never had much attachment to the land; they’d decamped for New York State a few years after Joseph was born. Thus New York — specifically the area around Palmyra — was where Joseph grew to manhood and worked his first miracles.
So the next afternoon, Marie and I left our friends at one of Vermont’s innumerable cheesemakers and headed toward Sharon.
Our visit to this unfamiliar spot turned strange right away. There’s an LDS meetinghouse right by the highway in Sharon — but little evidence of the Smith birthplace until you turn off the main thoroughfare and continue on a winding, narrow road up the hill. Even better, once you reach the road’s end, park your vehicle and step out into the cold — you will immediately be engulfed in song. Stereo speakers concealed in the brush around the parking lot continually play sacred hymns at top volume. The hills there really are alive with the sound of music. It’s unnerving.
And even more unnerving, in Marie’s and my case, was the sight of a distinguished-looking man in a dark suit exiting the visitors’ center and making a beeline for our vehicle. This was our greeter, Elder Mitchell. He would be our guide during our visit to Joseph Smith’s birthplace. And of course he greeted us right there in the parking lot. Because it would be absurd here for us to go knocking on the Mormons’ door, right?
Elder Mitchell welcomed us warmly. Although his greetings were directed mostly at me, since Marie was already hesitating to join in. I’m sure the spooky music and the rapid confrontation were already giving her second thoughts about this caper. She might have been wondering if she could just stay outside and smoke cigarettes until I’d had my fill of jousting with the Saints. Fortunately she concluded it was too cold for that. Plus there were no ashtrays to be seen here anyway.
The first thing Elder Mitchell wanted to know was whether my companion and I were Saints. I said that we were not. “But I have read Fawn Brodie’s book,” I added, in order to show all my cards to Elder Mitchell right away. Fawn Brodie was a member of the Mormon flock — a niece of one of the LDS Presidents, in fact — who later left the church and wound up writing the most original and well-researched biography of Joseph Smith. Brodie’s book is not popular among Saints — to them, she’s basically an apostate. But many do nevertheless acknowledge her work and contend respectfully with its claims.
Fairly warned, Elder Mitchell led us inside the visitor center’s “museum.” The exhibits on display there, illustrating Joseph Smith’s early history, were not especially memorable or extensive. There were some undistinguished household artifacts, meant to represent common items from the house where Smith was born (which no longer stands). There were some paintings depicting the man himself, or key events in his life — but of course they were just paintings, someone’s idealized versions of reality. The most impressive exhibit by far was a wall-sized timeline illustrating key events in the growth of the LDS Church.
The timeline was where I got into my first tête-à-tête with Elder Mitchell. As the three of us shuffled past the illustrated panels, I had some genuine questions for our guide about major decisions in Joseph Smith’s career. Elder Mitchell was ready for my initial questions — which he answered with variations on the phrase “God willed it.” But when we reached the panel depicting Joseph Smith’s defenestration and murder at the hands of an angry mob storming the Carthage, Illinois jail in 1844, I wasn’t having it. Maybe Illinois Governor Thomas Ford was in fact a cruel man whose heart had been hardened by dark forces against the Saints. But even on the 19th-century American frontier, I knew that Illinois’ detention of Joseph Smith still required some legal basis — the Prophet himself was a skilled litigant — and I wanted to get Elder Mitchell’s view of it. Yet Elder Mitchell wouldn’t budge from his evil-based hypothesis, here.
But at this point another visitor to the museum, a man called Elder Fife, inserted himself into our discussion. Now, Elder Fife was one nifty character. He was a genial smoothie, utterly unflappable. And he seemed to command unspoken deference from everyone else in the room. Even though Elder Mitchell (and his wife) had been introduced to us as the senior LDS officials at this site.
Elder Fife didn’t have any additional insight into Illinois’ legal basis for detaining Joseph Smith — but he didn’t stumble over his words or get flustered like Elder Mitchell did. Instead of debating the legal merits of Joseph Smith’s detention, Elder Fife just offered what he thought was the obvious lesson of the Prophet’s death: That Smith was murdered by a lawless mob empowered by perfidious state authorities, and so regardless of what you think about LDS doctrine, you still must agree that Joseph Smith achieved martyrdom in the truest sense of the word.
Mollified by the dulcet tones and reassuring manner of Elder Fife, Marie and I returned once more to Elder Mitchell’s guidance. For a while Elder Mitchell passed us off to one of his younger charges, Elder Green — a college kid from Utah who’d been assigned to do his two-year mission at this facility, of all unlikely places. From the room’s large picture window, Elder Green gave us a desultory visual tour of the surrounding countryside. But he only had our full attention when he described (at our urging) what his mission assignments were like, and what he thought about being sent to dull old Vermont instead of going off to, say, Peru or Nepal or Madagascar.
In fact that was the best part of this visit — listening to the Saints tell their personal stories. The doctrine and history kind of faded into the background. Elder Mitchell eventually loosened up and told some tales about what it was like to serve as caretakers of this out-of-the-way facility. Although even then, the man couldn’t completely abandon the hard sell: At one point Elder Mitchell offered me a copy of the Book of Mormon, and when I said that I already had one, he turned and instead pressed the volume on Marie, closing the deal by saying that he could “see in the faith in her eyes.” In fact Marie had no more interest than I have in reading Joseph Smith’s actual scriptures (once famously described by Mark Twain as “chloroform in print”). So this copy of the holy book was destined to join its twin on my shelf, dusty and unread. I considered it kind of a low blow for Elder Mitchell to pressure shy Marie like that, since I thought I had clearly indicated to him that he should focus all his sales tactics on me.
But no harm, no foul. Once we’d exhausted all the exhibits in the exhibit room, all that was left was to venture out into the freezing cold and visit the birthplace monument. This is a granite obelisk erected in December 1905 on the centenary of Joseph Smith’s birth. The stone shaft reaches 38.5 feet in height, commemorating the Prophet’s age in years at the time of his death. The obelisk comes with a story about its erection, which we heard from Elder Mitchell’s wife (who first mistook Marie and me for a married couple and asked if we had children yet). While we stood on the facility’s outdoor porch, Sister Mitchell explained to us that the obelisk — an exceptionally flawless slab of Vermont granite — was brought to Sharon in plenty of time for the centenary celebration. But on the appointed day it couldn’t be carried up the hill, because the horses couldn’t traverse the winter mud. The downcast Saints chose to pray on the matter. And within an hour, a sudden cold snap had frozen the mud sufficiently for the horses to finish pulling the obelisk up the hill.
Okay, fine. Sister Mitchell probably could have told us that story just as easily while we were inside the museum — so we were already quite chilled once we stepped off the porch and made our way up to the monument. But out here we re-encountered Elder Fife, and got him to tell us the remarkable story of how he met his wife: Their first meeting actually occurred at the Church’s annual pageant at Palmyra, NY. And even more remarkably, Elder Fife had actually played a key role in the pageant in at least one year: He had played Joseph Smith, Sr. — the Prophet’s father.
This was the theme of Marie’s and my visit to the Smith birthplace. The actual church narratives were kind of unreliable when approached in this form. I’d no doubt learn them more thoroughly if I finished reading Fawn Brodie’s book. But encountering the Saints in the flesh and convincing them to reveal their personal stories was irreplaceable. I should have focused our visit on this activity right away. Instead of trying to debate points of legal or religious doctrine.
Finally, after a solid two-hour visit, the sun began to sink again behind the frosty Vermont hills — and Marie and I said goodbye to our Mormon hosts. We even turned down Elder and Sister Mitchell’s offer to share a cup of hot chocolate with us while they started closing down for the day. “No thank you,” I said, “we have to get to a bar.” And then, per Marie’s firm demand, I drove us to the Long Trail Brewery and we stayed there until it closed.
From Joseph Smith’s birthplace to a famous alehouse in a single drive — it was a nice way for a straightedge atheist to spend a weekend afternoon. Although I’m still not sure what Marie thought of the whole escapade, in the end.
Photo by user “origamidon” via Flickr.
