Day 4 - Menden- A Book, a Brigham, and Battle in the Sky

A short drive from Palmyra we arrived at the location of the first contact any of our ancestors had with the restored Gospel. It all began in Menden, New York which remains to this day a small collection of farms and homesteads surrounded by rich farmland as far as sight reaches. In the late 1820's the social and  cultural hub of the region was the Thomlinsen Inn where often gathered three neighbor families, the Greene's(our ancestors), the Young's(yup, those ones), and the Kimballs(yup, those ones). 

There are two stories about how these three families first got their hands on a Book of Mormon but I'll tell the one related by our ancestor Rhoda Young. (If you want the other story you can check it out here...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFY1Edg9yhM)

One of Joseph Smith's younger brothers, Samuel Smith, was called as one of the first missionaries of the church soon after it was organized in 1830 at the Whitmer farm in Fayette. 

  On the second day of his journey and just 25 miles southeast of Palmyra, Samuel stopped at the house of John P Greene, then a Methodist preacher. John wasn't interested, calling the Book of Mormon a "nonsensical fable" but he agreed to take the book on his preaching circuit to see if anyone was interested.  Returning a month later Greene hadn't found any interest but his wife Rhoda had read the book and liked it. Samuel said that the spirit constrained him from taking the book back and gifted it to her. Rhoda burst into tears and asked Samuel to pray with her, which he did. Afterward, he instructed her on how to gain a testimony of the book through prayer, asking God if it was true and she would, "receive the spirit of God which would enable her to discern the things of God."

At the urging of his wife, John Greene eventually read and prayed about the Book of Mormon as she had. Soon after, both were baptized. The book was next given to Rhoda's brother Phineas Young(quickly gained a testimony and was baptized) who gave it to Brigham Young who gave it to another sister who was the mother of the wife of Heber C. Kimball. All of whom gained testimonies and were baptized.

I'll end with a story that happened three years before any of these families had any contact with the church pieced together from their journals. On the night of September 22 1827 "John P. Greene, a Reformed Methodist preacher, and his neighbors, witnessed a miraculous scene in the starlit skies over Mendon, New York.  On the eastern horizon they saw smoke rise and form into the shape of a bow. " According to John’s neighbor, Heber C. Kimball:

            In this bow an army moved, commencing from the east and marching to the west; they continued marching until they reached the western horizon.  They moved in platoons, and walked so close that the rear ranks trod in the steps of their file leaders, until the whole bow was literally crowded with soldiers.  We . . . could discover the forms and features of the men.  The most profound order existed throughout the entire army; when the foremost man stepped, every man stepped at the same time; I could hear the steps.  When the front rank reached the western horizon a battle ensued, as we could distinctly hear the report of arms and the rush.

The Greenes, Youngs, and Kimballs sat on a hill together and watched this astonishing display for two or more hours and puzzled over its meaning.

            In the predawn hours of that same day, twenty-five miles to the northeast on a hillside near Palmyra, a heavenly messenger delivered a compilation of ancient records to twenty-one-year-old Joseph Smith. 

And that's how it all began folks. One book and one invitation has led to who knows how many other testimonies, books, invitations and more testimonies. The lord works in mysterious ways.