NEWS FEATURE: In a Small Ohio Town, Origins of Mormon Faith are Recalled

c. 2003 Religion News Service KIRTLAND, Ohio _ The rough upstairs room where Joseph Smith ran the School of the Prophets is as it was when the earliest group of Mormons reported seeing God and Jesus appear to them in the original Newel K. Whitney Store. The plain benches stand where they were more than […]

c. 2003 Religion News Service

KIRTLAND, Ohio _ The rough upstairs room where Joseph Smith ran the School of the Prophets is as it was when the earliest group of Mormons reported seeing God and Jesus appear to them in the original Newel K. Whitney Store.

The plain benches stand where they were more than 170 years ago when church leaders sat and chewed tobacco and spit it on the wooden floor as they tried to figure out what to do with their new religious movement.


And it was in that simple room that 20 men set their pipes aside, and millions of Mormons for generations to come swore off smoking, after Smith said he received a divine revelation against alcohol and tobacco.

The next room is the parlor where Smith worked, replicated down to the quill pen, rocking chair and the wooden table furnishing the quarters where he spent hours on his own translation of the Bible.

Across the street is a re-creation of the John Johnson Inn, where the 12 earliest Mormon apostles left on their first mission for a church that would grow to some 12 million and be defined by aggressive door-to-door evangelization throughout the world. Next door is the Whitney home, where the first bishop of the church was called and an important healing was said to have taken place.

In these simple buildings, in a small town in Northeast Ohio, the most successful made-in-America religion took shape and developed much of the doctrine and administrative structure that guides the worldwide Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints today.

“In a sense, it’s one of the best-kept secrets in Northeast Ohio,” says historian Karl Anderson, author of “Joseph Smith’s Kirtland: Eyewitness Accounts.” “Most of our doctrine and our beliefs and tenets came out of Kirtland.”

But this secret is now out, say church and local tourism officials.

After a $10 million project to re-create major historical buildings of 1830s Kirtland, pilgrims and tourists from around the world can see for themselves lives of the early converts and settlers in a town where the church had its headquarters longer than in any other place but Salt Lake City.

Last month, in a voice that sometimes choked with emotion, Gordon Hinckley, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, dedicated the historic village in a ceremony attended by Ohio Lt. Gov. Jennette Bradley and covered by several television stations and a newspaper from Salt Lake City.


Officials expect the number of visitors to Historic Kirtland to go from 45,000 last year to about 90,000 this year.

From the days Smith first called his followers to Ohio through its recent renaissance, the story of the Mormon Church in Kirtland has been one filled with courage, sacrifice, danger and all-too-human struggles for power. The latest chapter being written is one of a partnership between a city and a religious group forever intertwined in American history.

It was in the 1820s that a farmer’s son named Joseph Smith claimed to have been visited in a vision by the Angel Moroni and led to a cache of golden plates that he would translate into the Book of Mormon. A church was formed in upstate New York in 1830 after the book’s publication.

Not long after, following the success of missionaries in Northeast Ohio, Smith reported a revelation to move the church to Kirtland.

Over the next seven years, the community would grow from 1,120 to 3,230, a population about the size of Cleveland. During that time, the number of Mormons increased from 70 to an estimated 2,000. The church even started its own short-lived bank.

In the 1830s in Kirtland, the new church is said to have received 65 revelations from God and established the form of church government.


In a remarkable show of faith for a small, relatively impoverished community, church members built a three-story “House of the Lord” that became one of the largest buildings in Northeast Ohio. The Kirtland Temple is where Smith is said to have been personally handed down authority for his new church from the ancient prophets Moses, Elias and Elijah.

The temple, built on top of a hill, is still a major tourist destination. The building is operated by the Community of Christ, formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Latter-day Saints, a much smaller group than the Mormon Church.

The addition of the historic village built by the Mormon Church is expected to make Kirtland a must-stop for Mormon bus tours and for a wide range of visitors interested in early American life.

A new visitors center shows a film of the Kirtland era and drawings of the city during the period. A short drive away is the Isaac Morley Farm, where Smith lived for a period and where high priests were first ordained.

Officials at the visitors center say they already have seen a jump in attendance as well as advance reservations with benefits to the local economy. One local hotel has reported reservations from 10 busloads of tourists, said Robert Ulas, executive director of the Lake County Visiors’ Bureau.

“It used to be they would come for an hour or an hour and a half. Now, they’re spending a day,” said church historian Keith Perkins.


City and church groups are working together. The Mormon Church and the Community of Christ are encouraging visitors to spend time at both sites.

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In the tumult of building a new religious movement, the early Mormons in Kirtland had to deal with internal and external strife.

Others in Kirtland in the 1830s, in a pattern that would be repeated across this country in waves of anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism, were fearful of the large groups of religious outsiders, many of them poor, moving into their community.

Some were concerned the new church members would turn the village into a Mormon government. In 1830, no church members held town offices in Kirtland Township. In 1837, slightly less than two-thirds of the officials, excluding supervisors of highways, were church members. according to historian Milton Backman Jr., author of “Heaven’s Resound: A History of the Latter-day Saints in Ohio 1830-1838.”

The responses included economic boycotts, which prompted church members to build their own businesses such as the bank and sawmill, along with more violent incidents.

Smith was tarred and feathered as early as 1832. By the time he left, on the night of Jan. 12, 1838, Smith was fearful for his life.


One hundred sixty-five years later, the historical village re-creating the life of the church during the Kirtland years is “going to be the unheralded tourism revenue generator in Lake County,” Ulas said.

DEA END BRIGGS

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