Picture This

Some of the beautiful pictures from this article are taken from the new Come Follow Me Wall Calendar for 2025 which can be pre-ordered now by CLICKING HERE. 

The only farm in the world I have been to more often than Joseph and Lucy Mack Smith’s farm in Manchester Township, New York is my own boyhood home farm near Rolla, Missouri. The Smith Farm is full of wonder for me and is a place that provides texture, light and beauty for a photographer. My favorite time to film is early in the morning, starting just before sunrise until about 90 minutes after.

There is so much moisture in this area and the temperature changes so much from nighttime to morning, there is often a low-lying fog that settles around the farm. That makes for some really beautiful images. I love this one above. This is looking south at the morning sky. You can see the Smith Frame House there on the right and, of course, the stacked split rail fence leading to the home. The home for two to three generations looked very different than it does now. President Gordon B. Hinckley wanted the home to be taken back to as close to how the Smiths knew it as possible. Renovation experts carefully fine-tooth-combed the house for original interior structure, beams and paper, etc. and made the home very authentic. Most of the home is original to the time when Alvin Smith started to build it and when Hyrum and the others finished it.

This is the interior of the Smith Cabin, located not only at the north end of the original 100-acre purchase of land, but a little bit over the line. Such things often happened in the early 1800’s. At 20 feet x 24 feet, you can see why Lucy called this their “snug little cabin” with nine children living here, plus the parents! Nothing in this reconstruction is original to the Smith family, but the period Bible on the table is open to the Book of James, so one can see James 1:5 and read it in a similar way to how young Joseph would have seen it. We visited the site for many, many years when there was no cabin here. In 1982 the site of the log cabin was located during an archaeological excavation of this north end of the original property. The cabin was erected in 1997-98 and President Hinckley dedicated it on March 27, 1998.

Walking through the Sacred Grove on the Smith Farm, just as the sun is coming up, is a humbling and spiritual experience. The rays of the sun begin to pierce the thick forest and sometimes even send beams of light coming down from the canopy. The trees are tall and beautiful in every season.

Sometimes I like to just point my lens to the top of the canopy and see what I can see. The texture of the sugar maples and the shagbark hickories are especially attractive to me. In this area, during the Smith’s era, they tapped around 1,500 maple trees to produce an average of 1,000 pounds of sugar each season. The amount of work that involved was tremendous and would be a great training ground for all the Smith children.

According to Don Enders, former director of the Historic Sites Division of the Church History Department, this beautiful virgin forest in 1818, “was covered with a magnificent stand of hardwood forest. Many of the trees were from 200 to 350 years old. Maples, beech, hop hornbeam, and wild cherry dominated the landscape, interspersed with ash, oak, hickory, and elm. This forest supported as many as 110 trees per acre…the upper canopy of this forest reached heights of more than 100 feet, with a few enormous elms rising over 125 feet.”[i] William Smith, younger brother of the Prophet Joseph, reported that some of the elms had a diameter of ten to eleven feet. Lucy wrote that they cleared 30 acres of forest in their first year and a half! That is over 3,000 trees and extremely hard and labor-intensive work!

Artist Andrew Wyeth once said, “If one could only catch that true color of nature – the very thought of it drives me mad.” I feel that way on the Smith Farm. There is so much color everywhere you turn. Those reds in the foreground maple branches are so delicious to me, I could stare at them all day long and be filled with joy. Even the textures of the hawthorn bushes, the Queen Anne’s lace mixed with the rail fences just bring delight to the soul here.

Did the Prophet Joseph see all this in his youth? You bet he did—and so much more!

And now, you can picture this.

Some of the beautiful pictures from this article are taken from the new Come Follow Me Wall Calendar for 2025 which can be pre-ordered now by CLICKING HERE. 

[i] Enders, Don, The Sacred Grove, 20 February 2019 in history.churchofjesuschrist.org.