1833: The Plat Is Only One Event This Year

Of the six years this site covers, 1833 has the strongest claim to being the most consequential — and the most violent. It opens with a school meeting in a cramped upstairs room above a Kirtland store and closes with twelve hundred people driven from their homes in Missouri at gunpoint. In between sits the Word of Wisdom, the completion of the First Presidency, the Plat of Zion, the vision of the House of the Lord, a temple groundbreaking, a destroyed printing press, and a revelation attempting to explain why any of the year’s disasters had been permitted at all. The Plat and the House each warrant their own page on this site; this page is about everything around them.

January – February: A School and a Health Code

Following a revelation the previous December instructing the church’s leading elders to organize and establish a school, the School of the Prophets held its first meeting in late January 1833, in a small upper room above Newel K. Whitney’s Kirtland store — the same building where Joseph and Emma Smith were then living. Roughly a dozen to twenty elders attended sessions that mixed doctrinal instruction with secular subjects. The room’s conditions produced one of the year’s more incongruous revelations: Emma Smith’s complaints about the tobacco spittle she was left to scrub from the floor prompted Joseph Smith to inquire further, and on February 27 he dictated the revelation known as the Word of Wisdom, counseling against tobacco, alcohol, and hot drinks among those attending the school, before it was extended more broadly to the church.

March: The Presidency Completed

The office left vacant by Jesse Gause’s excommunication the previous winter was filled on March 15, when Frederick G. Williams — already serving as Joseph Smith’s clerk, an experienced surveyor, and one of the larger landowners in the area — was called into the Presidency. Williams’s surveying background would matter directly within weeks: it was very likely Williams who began drafting the physical layout of a city for Zion that April, working from a pattern the church’s revelations had been gesturing toward since 1831.

May – June: The Plat and the Vision

The plat itself, and the accompanying vision of a House of the Lord, are treated in full on their own pages. In outline: on May 6, a revelation recorded as Section 94 issued specific, lot-numbered building instructions — a house for the presidency, a printing house, inheritances for named individuals — without ever explaining how the lots were numbered or oriented. That silence only makes sense against a physical plan already in hand: the revelation is legible only to someone already looking at the plat, which places the plat’s substantial completion before May 6, not after it. (The Joseph Smith Papers project currently dates this revelation to August 2, 1833 on the basis of later manuscript headings; this site follows the earlier, traditionally attributed date of May 6, on the strength of the internal evidence above, and treats the August heading as a record of later transcription rather than original reception.) A rebuke followed on June 1 for the delay in acting on the May revelation; three men — Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, and Frederick G. Williams — were selected the next day to receive a design for the central building; and on June 3 the three reported a vision of the building itself, later described by Williams as having appeared to them in enough detail to specify the interior. A groundbreaking followed on June 5. Between June 20 and 25, Williams recorded the plat’s text into Joseph Smith’s letterbook, and on June 25 the plat and its accompanying letter were dispatched to church leaders in Independence, Missouri — thirteen hundred miles and one month before the Independence press would be reduced to wreckage.

July: The Press Destroyed

On July 20, a crowd of Jackson County citizens confronted church leaders in Independence and demanded the closure of the church’s printing office and store and the departure of the Saints from the county entirely. When church leaders refused to consent, the mob destroyed the printing office — the same press that had been quietly issuing The Evening and the Morning Star since the previous June — and tarred and feathered Bishop Edward Partridge and church member Charles Allen in the street. Three days later, on July 23, under further threat of violence, local church leaders signed a document, under duress, agreeing that the Saints would leave the county by the following spring.

The plat sent to Independence one month earlier arrived into this same crisis. It reached John Whitmer with no explanatory text attached, and Whitmer himself added marginal notes to the drawing using the letter and letterbook text Williams had sent along with it — annotating, in effect, a blueprint for a city that the same summer’s mob violence was already making impossible to build where it stood.

October – November: Expulsion

Despite the July agreement, church leaders in Missouri spent the following months exploring legal options rather than departing, retaining their deeds on Joseph Smith’s counsel and publicly announcing on October 20 that the Saints intended to stay. The announcement set vigilantes back in motion immediately. Violence resumed on October 31 and continued for several days; on November 4, an attack on Latter-day Saint homes near the Big Blue River left three people dead, one of them a church member, and the following day a local militia colonel disarmed roughly 150 church members under the pretense of restoring order, imprisoning several of the men. Over the following weeks, close to twelve hundred Saints were driven out of Jackson County entirely, most fleeing across the Missouri River into neighboring Clay County with whatever they could carry.

December: An Explanation Demanded

Word of the expulsion reached Kirtland by late November, and Joseph Smith spent the following weeks seeking, without success at first, an explanation for why the Lord had permitted it. On the night of December 16–17, he dictated the revelation recorded as Section 101, stating that the expulsion had resulted from “jarrings, and contentions, and envyings, and strifes, and lustful and covetous desires” among the Missouri Saints themselves, while promising that Zion would still be redeemed, though “chastened for a little season.” The revelation closes the year on the same note it effectively opened on in January: an institution trying, in real time and without the benefit of hindsight, to discern which of its setbacks were ordinary human failure and which carried some larger meaning — the same discernment problem Joseph Smith had first named publicly at the church’s first conference back in June 1830.