On this page
The Restoration is usually taught as a list of events. Put the list on a line with the years to scale and it changes shape: two long silences, one very crowded spring, and a great deal of waiting in between.
The shape of the decade
Ten years, from a fourteen-year-old in a wood to an organised church with a printed book behind it.
Most of those ten years are quiet. Nearly everything people can name happens in about fifteen months at the end.
1820: the grove
Spring 1820, near Palmyra, New York. Joseph Smith, fourteen, caught between competing revivals in a district where several were running at once, goes into the woods near his family's farm to pray about which church to join.
He later described seeing the Father and the Son, and being told to join none of them.
The exact date is not recorded. Joseph's own accounts say spring, and the earliest of them was written down twelve years afterwards. There are four accounts in his lifetime, with differences of detail between them, which is a subject in itself and not one this page can settle.
What is relevant here is what happens next, which is nothing, for three and a half years.
1823: Moroni, and four years of waiting
On the night of 21 September 1823, and again into the morning of the 22nd, Joseph described a messenger named Moroni appearing in his bedroom and telling him of a record buried in a hill nearby.
He went to the hill the next day and was not permitted to take the record. He was told to return on the same date the following year.
He returned in 1824, 1825, 1826 and 1827. Four annual visits, each one a year apart.
That is a detail worth sitting with. A seventeen-year-old is told about a buried record and then waits four years, going back on the anniversary each time and coming away empty-handed.
Other things happen in those years. His eldest brother Alvin dies in November 1823. The family works as hired labour. Joseph is employed briefly by Josiah Stowell on a treasure-digging venture in Pennsylvania, which is where he meets Emma Hale. They marry in January 1827.
1827: the plates
On 22 September 1827, on the fourth anniversary, Joseph received the plates.
The immediate consequence was not translation but harassment. Word spread, attempts were made to seize the record, and by December the Smiths had moved to Harmony, Pennsylvania, to Emma's family.
The winter of 1827 to 1828 is slow going. Emma scribes for a time. Joseph copies characters onto a sheet, which Martin Harris takes to New York.
1828: the loss
Martin Harris scribes from April to June 1828, producing 116 pages. He takes them home to show his family. They are lost.
Joseph loses the gift and the plates for a period. From the summer of 1828 to the spring of 1829 there is a nine-month gap in which almost nothing moves.
On the line, this is the second of the two long silences, and it is the one people forget. The story as usually told runs straight from the plates to the translation. It does not. It stops for the better part of a year.
1829: everything at once
Then the pace changes completely.
- 5 April. Oliver Cowdery arrives in Harmony.
- 7 April. Translation begins in earnest and runs almost without a break.
- 15 May. Joseph and Oliver describe John the Baptist conferring the Aaronic Priesthood, and baptise each other in the Susquehanna.
- Late May or June. They describe Peter, James and John conferring the Melchizedek Priesthood. No date is recorded, and the sources do not allow one to be fixed. Estimates range across several weeks.
- Late May or early June. The move to the Peter Whitmer farm at Fayette, New York.
- June. The Three Witnesses, then the Eight Witnesses, are shown the plates.
- 11 June. The copyright is secured.
- End of June. The manuscript is finished.
- August. Typesetting begins at Grandin's press in Palmyra.
Four months. The translation, both priesthood restorations, the witnesses and the copyright all sit inside it.
The undated Melchizedek Priesthood restoration is a good example of how this site handles things. It is not given a false date to make the line tidy. It appears as a range, marked approximate, with the reason stated.
1830: the book and the Church
26 March 1830. The Book of Mormon goes on sale at Grandin's bookstore in Palmyra. Five thousand copies, paid for by Martin Harris mortgaging his farm.
6 April 1830. The Church is organised. Eleven days later.
The proximity of those two dates is not accidental and it is easy to miss. The book came first, by a week and a half, and the organisation followed it.
The gaps are the point
Set out with the years to scale, the decade looks like this: three and a half years of silence after the grove, four years of annual visits to the hill, fifteen months of possessing the plates with very little to show, nine months of nothing after the pages were lost, and then four months in which the whole thing happens.
Roughly nine and a half of the ten years are waiting.
That is not how it is usually taught, because a list of events has no spaces in it. It is what the line shows, and it is a different story: less a sequence of announcements than a long stretch of not much, ending in a spring that must have been overwhelming.
The translation itself is covered in how long did the Book of Mormon translation actually take, and the founding date in why the Church counts its beginning from 6 April 1830. Every entry for the period is on the Restoration era page.