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Canal Town
When the Smith family came in 1816, Palmyra was a village of about 600 people sitting on the planned route of the Erie Canal. The canal opened in 1825 and turned the place into a trading center. The village incorporated two years later, in March 1827.

A Farm Out of Forest
About two miles south of the village, the Smiths made a first payment on 100 acres of thick woods. By the spring of 1820 they had cleared about 30 of them, and they left large stands of timber on the farm's east and west sides.

The First Edition
5,000 copies of a 590-page book, printed and bound in Egbert B. Grandin's shop on Main Street by about a dozen men over seven months. An ordinary book of the day was printed in runs of less than half that.

• 1817: The Smiths rented a house in the village for about two years. Joseph Sr., Alvin and Hyrum hired out as day laborers, the family ran a small shop, and Lucy painted oilcloth covers for tables and chests while they saved toward land of their own.
• Spring 1820: Joseph, 14, went into the woods near the house to pray, probably close to ground the family was clearing. He later wrote that it was the first time he had tried to pray out loud. There, by his account, God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him.
• September 21, 1823: In the middle of harvest, the angel Moroni came to Joseph three times in the night, in a bedroom of the log home he shared with his brothers. By the third visit it was nearly dawn.
• September 1827: Joseph and Emma were living in the family's frame house when he brought the plates home. He hid them under the hearth bricks, then in the loft of the cooper's shop with the empty box buried under the floor. A mob tore up the floorboards and smashed the box, and never looked in the loft overhead.
• June 1829: Grandin turned the printing job down, believing the book was a fraud. Joseph Smith and Martin Harris found a printer in Rochester willing to take it, then came back and asked Grandin again. This time he agreed to print and bind 5,000 copies for $3,000. On August 25 Harris, a Palmyra farmer, mortgaged his farm north of the village to Grandin to secure the bill.
• March 26, 1830: The first copies went on sale in Grandin's bookstore, bound in brown calfskin with "Book of Mormon" in gold on the spine.

1. The Erie Canal still runs through the village, a few hundred yards north of Main Street.
2. The Smith farm is on Stafford Road. The Church bought it in 1907. The log home was rebuilt on its original foundation and dedicated in 1998, and the frame house, about 125 yards south, has been restored along with the barn and the cooper's shop.
3. The Sacred Grove lies west of the houses, across the farm, with paths through it. No one can place the First Vision any closer than the wooded part of the farm, so the marker stands for the grove, not a known spot. The old forest there has gone by the name Sacred Grove since at least 1905.
4. Hill Cumorah, in Manchester about three miles south of the farm, is where Joseph went the day after Moroni's visits in 1823. He brought the plates home from it in September 1827. The Angel Moroni Monument on its summit was dedicated in 1935. Joseph put the plates on the hill's west side, not far from the top, and no source pins the spot down more closely than that.
5. The Grandin building stands at 217 East Main Street. The Church was given it in 1978, and after two and a half years of restoration President Gordon B. Hinckley dedicated it on March 26, 1998, 168 years to the day after the first copies went on sale. A few hundred yards away, in the old cemetery on Church Street, is the grave of Alvin Smith, Joseph's oldest brother. He died in November 1823 at 25.
6. The Martin Harris farm, the one he mortgaged to Grandin, is on Maple Avenue north of the village. Willard Bean bought 88 acres of it for the Church in 1937. The cobblestone house on it now stands where the original farmhouse did.
7. The Palmyra New York Temple sits on a drumlin on the east side of the old farm. President Hinckley dedicated it on April 6, 2000. Its grounds are edged by a rock wall Joseph and his brothers piled up while clearing fields.

• The farm had as many as 1,500 maple trees, and each spring the Smiths turned the sap into sugar and molasses.
• Loose printed sheets left Grandin's shop before the book did. Thomas B. Marsh was handed 16 pages and took them home to Boston, and Solomon Chamberlin got 64 and carried them on to Canada.
• Harris's August mortgage gave him 18 months to pay. Grandin didn't wait. In October 1830 he sold the mortgage for $2,000 in cash, and its new holder collected the full $3,000 when Harris's land was sold in April 1831.