In this revivalist period, with denominations battling for converts, the 14-year-old Smith was struggling to know where to turn. Pewter dishes, clothes' trunks and hardwood furniture evoke the natural simplicity of early frontier life. Logs are caulked with mud and straw, cedar shingles and tulip-poplar floorboards secured with square-headed nails. The reconstruction, completed in January 1998, was meticulous.
Archaeologists dug up 2,400 artifacts, from fireplace bricks and a row of cobbles to mislaid cutlery, buckles, burnt wheat and a pot lid. The house was destroyed over a century ago, but its location south of the village was rediscovered in 1969 using infrared aerial photography.
They rented a 100-acre wooded plot and built a 11/2-story log home along a wagon trail. Joseph Smith Sr., his wife, Lucy, and their eight children moved in 1816 from Sharon, Vt., to Palmyra, 20 miles southeast of Rochester. Lately, it has been painstakingly restoring the sacred sites that already draw thousands of people each year - and rebuilding others that vanished long ago. The 10-million-member church traces its origins to this drumlin country of apple orchards, farms and woods in western New York. Like her, some 90 percent of visitors belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which Smith founded in 1830 in Fayette, a Finger Lakes village 25 miles away. Some tourists nod, others bow their heads. Baird, 65, a retired teacher from Utah with curly white hair and a warm smile, ends her 20-minute tour with a Mormon church devotee's exhortation "I wish to tell you that I know in my heart that these events are true they truly happened." While praying there in 1820, the unschooled farmer's son told of sensing the power of Satan before encountering God and his son, Jesus. Sightseers crowd onto the rear porch as she directs their gaze to a nearby grove. In a cabin built of hand-hewn logs, Sister Marilyn Baird points to the cramped attic space above a straw-mattress bed where Joseph Smith said an angel appeared to him one autumn night in 1823.
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