Essential Heavyweight Map Tee

Which Town
Sharon. Joseph Smith put it plainly in his own history: born "in the town of Sharon, Windsor county, State of Vermont." The memorial's mail goes through South Royalton, the village at the foot of the hill, but the birthplace is in Sharon township.

The Farm
Lucy Mack Smith's father, Solomon Mack, owned it. Joseph Sr. and Lucy rented 68 acres from him and stayed about three years. Joseph Sr. farmed through the growing season and taught school in the winters.

The Monument
A polished granite shaft cut from one stone, 38½ feet long, a foot for each year of Joseph's life. It stands on a 12-foot-square base, and the whole monument is about 50 feet tall. When it went up it was the tallest polished granite shaft in America.

• December 23, 1805: Joseph Smith Jr. was born in the family's cabin on the Mack farm.
• Winter of 1807 to 1808: The Smiths left Sharon for Tunbridge, where Samuel was born that March, and then moved on to Royalton. Joseph, a toddler, probably remembered little of the farm.
• Autumn 1894: Junius F. Wells came looking for the birthplace with Spencer Clawson and his daughter Clara. A local guide kicked through the tall grass and found the old hearthstone and the stone outline of the cabin. Wells said that someday the Church should put a monument there.
• 1905: Sent by the First Presidency, Wells traced the old farm boundaries through land titles and the memories of longtime residents, and bought it for the Church. On July 24 he signed the contract for the monument. Granite from Barre came most of the way by rail, and teams hauled each load the last six miles. The first took 13 days, the second 20. The shaft was raised on December 8.
• December 23, 1905: On the 100th anniversary of the birth, President Joseph F. Smith dedicated the monument. The service was held in a small cottage built over the hearthstone, and the party had come out from Salt Lake City by special train.
• December 23, 2005: For the bicentennial, President Gordon B. Hinckley spoke from the visitors' center, a couple of feet from the hearthstone. His talk was carried by satellite into the program at the Conference Center and out to meetinghouses across the Church.

1. The Joseph Smith Birthplace Memorial sits on a hilltop east of South Royalton. The obelisk stands on the old farm, and a marker shows where the Smith cabin stood. The cottage of 1905 came down in the 1960s, when the present buildings went up. The original hearthstone is set into the visitors' center fireplace.
2. South Royalton is the village below the memorial. On the evening of the 1905 dedication, Wells spoke at a meeting there for Church leaders and local residents, and thanked the town for its help.

• The guide who showed Wells the hearthstone in 1894 was named Harvey Smith, a coincidence of names.
• When 22 horses couldn't budge the first load up the first incline, Wells wrote a telegram asking permission to ship the whole monument to Salt Lake City and put it up on the temple block. He decided to wait until Monday and never sent it.
• One night a mud hole at the foot of Haines's hill looked impassable. The temperature then fell 35 degrees in about three hours, and by morning the ground was frozen hard enough that the wagons split the planks. People in Royalton took to calling the mild weather that season "Mr. Wells's weather."