The manuscript lives at JosephSmithPapers.org — we link out rather than reproducing it.

In June 1833, Frederick G. Williams — a counselor to Joseph Smith and his scribe at the time — recorded a plat for a city, drawn and described in Joseph Smith’s letterbook. Later accounts, including one attributed to Williams himself, describe the plan as shown to Joseph Smith, Williams, and Sidney Rigdon together rather than dictated to Joseph Smith alone. The plat and an accompanying letter were sent to church leaders in Independence, Missouri, arriving by late July 1833.

What the plat specifies

The plat lays out a square city, its streets a uniform eight perches (132 feet) wide, with barns and stables kept to the outer edge so that “no barns or stables will be in the City among the houses.” At its center sit three fifteen-acre blocks — two holding twelve public buildings each, the third a bishop’s storehouse — for twenty-four public buildings in total, each individually named on the back of the plat by revelation and recorded by Williams that same May. The surrounding blocks are divided into half-acre lots, one house permitted per lot, for a residential grid the plat itself estimates at “from 15 to 20 thousand people.”

Companion revelations that same spring specified a design for one of the twenty-four public buildings the plat lays out — see The House.

What this site does and does not claim about the numbers

The plat’s own text states an estimated population of “15 to 20 thousand” and describes twenty-four public buildings serving that population. Later independent analysis of the same manuscript — reading its units and vocabulary against sixteenth-century English usage — arrives at more precise figures for lots, offices, and population by a different method than the plat’s own stated estimate. This site distinguishes the two: the plat’s own words are treated as the primary record for 1833, and any more detailed modern reconstruction is identified as analysis, not as something the 1833 record states outright.

The mile, and the house

The plat’s own text calls itself “one mile square,” but Parliament did not fix the modern 5,280-foot statute mile until 1593 — six decades after the plat’s vocabulary of perches, rods, and chains would have entered common English use. Reconstructing the plat’s side length from its own stated units — its blocks, its streets, and the half-easements described in the margins — yields 6,336 feet, some 1,056 feet longer than the later statute mile.

Some later researchers read that gap, together with other vocabulary in the plat’s margins, as evidence the document is written in English last in common use during the era of William Tyndale’s Bible translation in the 1520s and 1530s. On that reading, “house” need not mean a single-family dwelling: sixteenth-century usage could apply the word to a large, multi-story residential building on the scale of a nobleman’s household — comparable to Cardinal Wolsey’s Hampton Court Palace, begun in 1515 — with a single half-acre lot potentially housing on the order of a hundred people.

This site treats that reading as later analysis, not as something the 1833 record states outright. The Joseph Smith Papers’ own annotation reads “one house per lot” as a literal single dwelling, and treats the resulting shortfall — 976 lots against a stated population of fifteen to twenty thousand — as an unresolved flaw in the 1833 plan rather than a clue to the word’s meaning. Readers should weigh the two accounts side by side rather than take either as settled.

Source: Joseph Smith Papers, “Plat of the City of Zion, circa Early June–25 June 1833.” This page paraphrases the manuscript rather than reproducing it; see the Source Index for a link to the original.