Joseph and Lucy Smith's Tunbridge Farm: An Archaeology and Landscape Study

Abstract

joseph and lucy smith's tunbridge farm by Mark L. Staker and Donald L. Enders is a chapter in a Latter-day Saint Book of Hours (a meditative guide to be read throughout the day filled with prayers meant to focus on guidance from God). Staker and Enders's volume uses archaeology and landscape to ponder a moment in God's intervention in the course of human life. The authors are ordinary, honest archaeologists digging at a founding and farming site in the lives of Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith. The Smiths were the parents of ten children, including Joseph Smith Jr., who founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This early hour of a new church and its material culture—the landscape, flowing water, hills, groves, cherry trees and apple trees—is a Genesis and this brief, well-written meditation allows readers to walk, touch, and witness the material culture of that important hour in the church's beginnings.There is a fair amount of archaeology done on sites of early Mormonism by Latter-day Saint archaeologists. It is all good archaeology, following standard methods, resulting in good reporting, and sometimes allowing for more authentic reconstructions like the Nauvoo Temple. Further, the archaeology of the early Mormonism that led to the Utah church is well-established and integrated into LDS Church projects. But there is not much archaeology within Mormonism that is considered foundational either to Mormonism or to historical archaeology. And the archaeology of early socialist communities or plural marriage communities is missing. Could all these archaeologies be considered different from conventional historical archaeology done for secular purposes? To be sure the excavation and reporting are equally responsible. Could we say that archaeology on Latter-day Saint sites is good to think with for spiritual purposes? Like reading a book of hours, or walking the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. Suppose they are meditations instead of being only good site reports. Suppose we read Latter-day Saint archaeology as a way of understanding how the material culture and its context of a very hard farming village existence and the quest to experience the spirit of God during Second Great Awakening are a way into seeing, understanding, and even—for an LDS Church member—living again the early context of the founding moments of Mormonism. If this might be the effect of mainline Latter-day Saint archaeology, then it does not matter whether the church publishes the archaeology or the Society for Historical Archaeology presents it. What matters is how we see a Book of Hours. They are chapters to be read during the day to let you into another part of daily life so that you can get through a day the way you are supposed to. They are perfectly reasonable prayer books drawn out of an empirical context. It is an archaeology of relics that works because the relics are real. This is what material culture is supposed to do, after all. It is what a bone from St. Peter in St. Peter's Basilica, from his tomb below the church, is also supposed to do. It tells us that another world—one that was important and is now gone—did happen.The key chapter, the best chapter, the reason for the book, is chapter 8: “Lucy's Meadow, Her Grove, and Her First Vision.” This is an understanding of the farm's landscape in Joseph and Lucy Smith's quest to be led by God and in her and secondarily, his, experiences in lively Methodism, rational Universalism, and evangelical Presbyterianism. This is one of the best tellings of the world of religious awakenings in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that I have ever read. It is a chapter not about religious confusion but about how Federal Period America (c. 1776–1820) tried to sort out how to be religious while also dealing with a lack of serious government, a quirky economy, high infant mortality, large families, and the question of how to find a way through it all. The rationality of Hosea Ballou's Universalism, an early form of American socialism, and Methodism with its deep emotional acting out through spirit possession, were all attempts at navigating this situation. Where was God to be found? And how? It's all here in this chapter, led by Lucy Smith's path, a woman with her man following her lead. Actually walking the landscape where it all happened with this chapter in your hands is a meditative journey that focuses the mind on those founders and their events. So, as happens all too often in American religious history, the quest is led by a woman, while the history and victory are taken by a man. But, and even so, this Book of Hours is devoted to a woman.