Sharon: Where Joseph Smith Was Born
Near Woodstock, Vermont
A short drive from this stretch of highway, on a hill above the White River in the town of Sharon, a granite obelisk with a thirty-eight-and-a-half-foot shaft marks the birthplace of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The shaft length is deliberate: one foot for each year of Smith's life before he was killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, in eighteen forty-four.
Smith was born here on December twenty-third, eighteen oh five, the fourth child of Joseph and Lucy Mack Smith. The family was poor and moved frequently across Vermont and then upstate New York, where Smith said he received his first visions as a teenager and later, in eighteen thirty, founded the Latter-day Saint movement.
The Church purchased the Sharon property in nineteen oh five and dedicated the memorial in nineteen oh five on the centennial of Smith's birth. The visitor center and surrounding grounds are open to the public and draw tens of thousands of pilgrims a year, making this quiet Vermont hillside one of the most visited Latter-day Saint sacred sites in the eastern United States.
Most drivers passing through Sharon on Route Fourteen see nothing but maple-covered hills. The monument is just a mile off this road, and most of them never know.
