Thunder, Cookies, & Mormon Miscellany

Friday, August 4…

Our campground is only about 20 minutes from Palmyra, NY, and Palmyra has lots of significance for Mormons, so today we’re off to visit 3 separate sites. Our first stop was the Visitors’ Center at Hill Cumorah, where the church puts on a huge pageant every July – cast of 650+, 10-level stage, seating for 8000, and it’s free. What really struck me, though, was a display of all the Books of Mormon. It’s currently published (sometimes in summary) in 110 languages. What I found so interesting was that the variety of fonts needed for some languages resulted in widely varying appearances of a written page – some texts seemed very tight (small characters), some quite open, some (probably the tight ones) seemed much darker overall. And the characters of some languages are unlike any letters (or symbols, such as Chinese) that I’d ever seen. Fascinating.

Farmhouse where Joseph
lived as a boy. 

The last thing we did here was watch a video of the beginnings of the church (the “Joseph Smith Story”). That lasted about 20 minutes, and we’d been in inner rooms of the building during the whole visit. Imagine our surprise when we walked out into the lobby and saw lightning bolts as wind and rain lashed the trees in the parking lot. (I was personally delighted – I love a good thunderstorm, and we hardly ever have one in Seattle.)

Fortunately (and typically), the rain let up soon and we headed to our next stop – the Smith Sr. family farm (including the woods where Joseph had his first vision). Our last stop was at the shop where the first edition of The Book of Mormon was printed and bound using the newest technology of the day. Missionaries (young and old) host all these places.

(The 2 in front are what we bought.)

On recommendation of one of these missionaries, we enjoyed delicious paninis at the Muddy Waters Café, overlooking the Erie Canal. (And brought home a couple huge cookies that we enjoyed later over a friendly game of gin rummy.)

BlogThoughts… Given the Mormon predilection for geneaology and our own emphasis on Mormon history today, I found it especially interesting when Amy (who has struggled to learn anything about her own heritage – none of us know much) sent me a text saying a fellow in SeaTac had contacted her to confirm information he had about my dad, who was apparently a cousin of his father. I’m eager to add this to my meager store of data.