1830: Publication, Incorporation, and the First Falling-Out

If 1829 was the year of unrepeatable witness, 1830 is the year the church became an institution — incorporated, licensed, conferenced — and immediately discovered what institutions have to defend against: a rival claim to revelation from inside its own membership, arriving before the year was even half over. It is also the year the church acquired, almost by accident, the Ohio congregation that would carry it through its next four years.

Winter: A Copyright Crisis and a Publication

The year opens under financial strain rather than institutional order. With Martin Harris’s farm mortgaged against the Grandin printing debt, Joseph Smith received a revelation directing Oliver Cowdery and Hiram Page to travel to Kingston, Upper Canada, to attempt to sell the Book of Mormon’s Canadian printing rights. They found no buyer — and, on inquiry, no provincial jurisdiction over copyright at all — and returned empty-handed in January or February 1830. The failure prompted Joseph Smith to seek clarification directly, producing the church’s founding statement on its own fallibility — recorded by David Whitmer’s later account of the episode — that revelation could come of God, of man, or of the devil, and that a failed revelation did not by itself discredit the process that produced it. On January 16, Joseph Smith Sr. and Martin Harris signed an agreement giving Harris the right to sell copies to recoup his security before general distribution, and on March 26 the Wayne Sentinel announced the Book of Mormon complete and for sale at Grandin’s Palmyra bookstore.

April 6: Incorporation and the First Conference

On April 6, at the home of Peter Whitmer Sr. in Fayette, the church was organized as a legal entity under New York State law. Six men served as the incorporators the statute required — Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, Hyrum Smith, Samuel H. Smith, David Whitmer, and Peter Whitmer Jr. — a list overlapping heavily, but not completely, with the twelve witnesses of the previous summer. Roughly thirty people attended. Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery were sustained as First and Second Elder — the church’s first standing offices of presidency, filled by common consent rather than by the unrepeatable event that had qualified the twelve witnesses a year earlier. The Articles and Covenants, dictated the day before, were read and accepted at a further Fayette gathering on April 11, where Oliver Cowdery delivered the church’s first public sermon and ten additional members were added. On April 16, Joseph Smith’s visit to Colesville, New York led to the conversion and baptism of the Joseph Knight Sr. family, establishing the Colesville branch — the congregation that would, within a year, become the church’s first organized migration.

The church’s first general conference followed on June 9, again at the Whitmer farm. Roughly twenty-seven members read and accepted the Articles and Covenants, and priesthood licenses — a formalization absent from the 1829 record entirely — were issued for the first time. Joseph Smith’s first recorded conference address concerned not office but discernment: that a revelation might come from God, from ordinary human impulse, or from deception, and that telling the three apart was each member’s own responsibility, exercised through the Holy Ghost, rather than something owed automatically to whoever was speaking.

September: A Rival Stone

The church’s first internal authority crisis came only three months later. In September 1830, Hiram Page — one of the Eight Witnesses of the previous year — began producing his own revelations by means of a seer stone, on subjects including the location and order of Zion. Newel Knight later recalled that Page “had quite a roll of papers full of these revelations, and many in the church were led astray by them,” and the record indicates that Oliver Cowdery himself, alongside several of the Whitmers, had accepted at least some of Page’s material as genuine. Joseph Smith sought clarification and received a revelation, later recorded as Section 28, stating plainly that what Page had written from the stone was “not of me,” and directing Cowdery — the very man who had entertained the material — to correct Page personally ahead of the church’s quarterly conference on September 26. The episode’s significance outlasted Page himself: it established, only five months after incorporation, that the church would recognize exactly one channel of revelation for the body as a whole, regardless of who else might sincerely believe they had received one.

October – November: The Lamanite Mission and an Unplanned Convert

That same September conference also commissioned the church’s first major missionary undertaking. Oliver Cowdery was called to preach to the American Indian tribes recently relocated west of Missouri under the 1830 Indian Removal Act — the “Lamanites” of Book of Mormon terminology — and was joined, by further revelation, by Peter Whitmer Jr., Parley P. Pratt, and Ziba Peterson. The four signed a formal covenant at Manchester, New York on October 17 and departed shortly after, preaching first to a Cattaraugus community near Buffalo before continuing toward Missouri.

The mission’s lasting consequence, however, had nothing to do with the Lamanites at all. Passing through northeastern Ohio, Parley Pratt sought out an old acquaintance: Sidney Rigdon, a Campbellite preacher in Mentor whose congregations numbered in the hundreds. Rigdon had already broken with Alexander Campbell’s Disciples of Christ and organized a communal “family” on Isaac Morley’s farm near Kirtland, holding goods in common stock. When the missionaries baptized Rigdon and much of the Morley farm “family” that November, the young church acquired, in a matter of weeks, both its largest single body of converts to date and a habit of communal property-holding its own leadership had not yet addressed. Rigdon himself traveled to New York within weeks to meet Joseph Smith and was almost immediately called as the church’s spokesman — a mark of the influence he would carry from the very outset of the two men’s association.

December: The Revelation to Gather

The year closes with the decision that would relocate the church’s center of gravity entirely. In December 1830, a revelation directed members to gather from New York to Kirtland, Ohio, promising “there I will give unto you my law” — a promise that would be fulfilled within ten weeks of the new year, once Joseph Smith himself completed the move in early February 1831.