In discussing how we may improve our interpretation of Joseph Smith’s first vision, I mentioned three prevailing notions about the event I would amend if I could:

  • That the current site of the Sacred Grove is where JS prayed in 1820.
  • That the setting of the vision was a lively spring morning.
  • That JS experienced an external visitation of God the Father and Jesus Christ.

There’s more that could be said about the precise location of the Sacred Grove, but I think my post last time covered the main sources and overall argument that the western edge of the property was opposite to where the Smiths cleared land in 1820 and 1821.

Today, I want to take a jackhammer to the myth represented in George Manwaring’s poem-turned-hymn “Oh, how lovely was the morning!” — the fantasy that the sun beamed radiantly above JS as he strolled through a bee-thrumming, bird-chirping shady glen to pray and see God and Jesus. Rather than present the scene as I imagine it, I’ll let the sources do the talking as best I can. Let’s dig in and see just what likely was going on in Manchester, New York, in early spring, 1820.

“Early in the Spring” in the Agrarian American Vernacular

Manwaring composed his poem from the steppes of Utah Valley the year after Brigham Young died — 58 years after JS’s first vision. According to family tradition, Manwaring’s inspiration was C.C.A. Christensen’s painting of the First Vision, which has not survived. Based on Christensen’s own script for presenting the painting, the scene placed a young JS in the woods. Unless Manwaring’s poem delivers line-level descriptions of Christensen’s painting, we really don’t know more about where Manwaring drew his specific references in building his own scene. What the two works seem to share is the detail about springtime — and only the 1838 History mentions spring, so this source probably was the basis for Christensen and Manwaring building the pageantry that most Latter-day Saints came to imagine.

One sentence in all the accounts describes the time of year for the vision:

It was on the morning of a beautiful clear day early in the spring of Eightteen hundred and twenty.

JS gave no absolute reference except the year, 1820; everything else is relative: morning, early in the spring. Such relativity has attracted sleuths looking to pin down the vision to a precise date. Some theories are quite creative, looking to the maple-tapping schedules of families like the Smiths to isolate a single day when the vision could have occurred. I’m not convinced we can nail it down because of multiple days that can satisfy JS’s descriptions, but we can approximate the climate and weather and reasonably assess the conditions of JS’s environment.

W. Wheaton serving in the US Army 6th Infantry at Sackets Harbor, New York, 85 miles from the Smith homestead, reported weather conditions three times every day of 1820. Comparison with newspapers and farmer’s almanacs of the region lend a high degree of probability that cloudy, snowy, rainy, and clear conditions were shared between the Manchester and Sackets Harbor areas. Because Manchester lies 20 miles inland from Lake Ontario and Wheaton lived right on the shoreline, there is a possibility that Wheaton would have experienced slightly windier conditions. But even now, barometric pressure readings between the two locations correspond tightly. When it’s cold in Sackets Harbor, it’s cold in Manchester.

Before we can drill down to the range of days in Wheaton’s weather log to check for a “beautiful clear day,” we have to parse “early in the spring.” Did JS understand “spring” to align with specific months, like, say March through May? Or did he mean it relative to the weather of 1820? (As in, he remembers the weather clearing up in 1820, and in 1838 he couldn’t tell you exactly what month that was, it’s just springtime in his adolescent memory.) Unfortunately, JS doesn’t riff on springtime elsewhere in his documents.

Nevertheless, JS and his family were solidly agrarian — they were clearing the ground for farming, and that much is well attested in the primary accounts and in contextual accounts. And American farmers of the 1820s and 1830s were keen on climate and weather and talked a lot about it. Newspapers and books published farming tips and harvest yields. I have reviewed dozens of these kinds of sources, and it’s quite consistent that “early spring” and “early in the spring” show up synonymously to refer to a particular window of horticultural possibilities.

In Loudon’s Encyclopedia of Gardening (1822), farmers report useful yields of early spring sown crops, and define early spring as the close of February, or in March, or the beginning of April; in mid-February or earlier, or mid-April or later, the ground is either too hard for planting (winter conditions) or too dry (spring conditions) for certain crops. The 1824 Compendium of Agriculture made the same recommendations. The New England Farmer in 1822 reported how oats “cannot be sown too early in the spring after the ground is thawed and become dry enough for sowing.” English farmers sowed in February according to tradition, but this didn’t always work for New England climates. The American Gardener’s Calendar (1830) marked early spring as when pruning was ideal, when sap may be expected to follow cutting and heal the plant better. The blossoming of fruit trees indicated the beginning of spring; “early spring” meant just before blossoms appeared. In Gill’s Technological Repository (1830), early spring ended “with the complete expansion of the leaves” of deciduous trees, and urged farmers clearing forested areas to cut down trees in winter, lop off branches, and let them remain until summer because heavy timber don’t transport on hard roads.

We could look farther and wider for more sources, but I think we have enough material to hypothesize a period between late February and mid-April 1820 for when JS entered the woods to pray. This aligns well with the detail JS provides: they were clearing trees, not sowing or harvesting, which makes sense in winter, late winter, and early spring months.

Weather Conditions in Early Spring 1820

Wheaton’s log for February through April shows a very cold few weeks. Temperatures between 7:00 am and 2:00 pm did not vary much, indicating the morning of the First Vision would have had a high of 64° F (Saturday 25 March or Sunday 26 March) or a low of 7° F (Tuesday 7 March). The warm days of March 25–26 are slight outliers; most days marked as clear are at or below freezing. Snow fell as late as April 7, with most days being cloudy. A spate of snowfall started on March 3 and lasted a week, practically canceling early March for its manifestly wintery conditions. Snow fell again on March 14, and clouds and some high winds followed until March 23 when Wheaton noted a “Pleasant night with moon light.” Several clear days continued, including a warm spell that may have felt like the beginning of spring.

However, snowfall on March 31 and high winds through April 10 brought more wintery conditions. “Pleasant” conditions did not return until April 11; Wheaton noted the ice on Lake Ontario broke up on April 13, and morning temperatures held steadily above 40 degrees thereafter. So we have two possible windows for “early spring” conditions within the colloquially marked “early spring” weeks: March 24–26 (three mornings marked as “clear” and not cloudy or windy) and April 11–20, all with clear mornings and manifestly non-wintery conditions.

The warmest temperatures in these windows was in the mid 50°s, the lowest in the mid 30°s. If JS entered the grove in late March, he would have seen snow on the ground or trudged through muddy ground where snow had just melted. If he entered in mid-April, he would have seen no snow, probably seen muddy ground, but would have seen his breath in the cold air. Leaves would only sparsley dot the trees, blossoms would have begun to flower on some fruit trees in the family’s orchard, and heavy timber would have been scattered around the clearing while the men waited for high-spring to haul it off for burning.

However we slice it, the “beautiful clear day early in the spring” of 1820 was a scene quite different than Manwaring’s description (and probably Christensen’s painting). Lots of bare trees, lots of mud, possibly some frost, and a chill in the air — but clear skies that seemed to occupy JS’s memory decades later.