1831: The Year of Two Gatherings

It is easy to let 1831 collapse into a single document: the Law, dictated February 9 at Kirtland. The Law was one revelation among many that year, and arguably not even the one with the largest long-term footprint — that distinction may belong to the August revelation that, for the first time, named a specific spot in Missouri as the literal site of the New Jerusalem. This page follows the year as the church itself lived it: a mass relocation, a communal experiment already underway when the migrants arrived, a legal collapse of that experiment within months, and a second, more consequential gathering founded before the year was out.

January – February: The Move to Ohio

The December 1830 revelation to gather to Kirtland began to be carried out immediately. Joseph Smith relocated in early February 1831, arriving three days after Sidney Rigdon himself reached Kirtland around February 1. Within days of his arrival, on February 4, a further revelation promised that “by the prayer of your faith ye shall receive my law that ye may know how to govern my Church” — and, less than a week later, on February 9, twelve elders united in prayer while Joseph Smith dictated the revelation that became known simply as the Law. A full account of that revelation’s text and its later editorial history is treated separately.

What the Law addressed, and what made it urgent enough to request within days of arriving, was already sitting on the ground in Kirtland. Sidney Rigdon, before his November 1830 conversion, had organized a communal “family” on Isaac Morley’s farm, holding goods in undivided common stock rather than individual title — a practice shaped in part by Rigdon’s exposure to Robert Owen’s utopian socialism. The incoming New York Saints were walking into a congregation that already had its own answer to the property question, and the Law’s insistence on individual stewardship under covenant and deed, rather than an undivided common pool, was a direct response to an arrangement already in practice rather than a rule issued in the abstract.

Spring: The Law in Practice, and Its First Failure

Putting the Law into effect exposed its practical seams almost immediately. Leman Copley, a former Shaker convert, offered his farm in Thompson, Ohio for incoming Colesville Saints to settle and consecrate. Within weeks Copley’s confidence wavered; he broke the arrangement, evicted the Saints from his own land, and the matter reached the Geauga County court, which ordered the church to return title to him. The episode demonstrated, within months of the Law’s dictation, that a covenant of consecration framed as a two-way arrangement could be unwound by a single disaffected donor — a concrete legal pressure that would shape how the revelation’s language was later revised for print.

The displaced Colesville Saints did not stay in Ohio. By June, Joseph Smith and a group of elders had set out for Missouri, arriving in Independence, Jackson County, that July.

June: The First High Priests

Before the Missouri departure, the church’s June conference at Kirtland marked a further institutional step: the first ordinations to the office of High Priest, an office the church had not previously conferred, conducted amid what participants described as an unusually intense outpouring of spiritual manifestation. The conference also directed a substantial company of elders to travel to Missouri — not merely to visit, but to learn where the church’s promised city was to be built.

August: A Second Gathering, Named

The year’s most consequential revelation, measured by what it set in motion rather than by how it is remembered today, came that August in Independence. Missouri was designated “the land of promise,” and Independence itself “the center place” for the city of Zion — the first time a specific, named location, rather than a general commandment to gather, had been identified as the site of the New Jerusalem the Book of Mormon and the church’s early revelations had spoken of since 1829. On August 3, a site for a temple was dedicated near Independence, and the Colesville Saints — already once displaced from Thompson, Ohio that spring — began settling permanently on land purchased in the new gathering place. The plat that would eventually give this site its detailed physical form was still nearly two years away; 1831 supplied only the location and the command to occupy it, but that alone reoriented the church’s geography for the remainder of this site’s chronology.

Autumn: Dissent from Within

Not every convert who reached Ohio in 1831 stayed persuaded. Ezra Booth, an early elder who had accompanied Joseph Smith’s Missouri party that summer, left the church that fall and published a series of letters in the Ohio Star sharply critical of Joseph Smith’s leadership and of conditions he had observed in Missouri, arriving less than eighteen months after incorporation.