PALMYRA, N.Y. — Many of the world's faithful make pilgrimages to Mecca. Others worship in the holy city of Jerusalem. And some even find their way here to a remote grove where a 14-year-old farm boy said he beheld God and Christ in 1820.
That boy, Joseph Smith Jr., later founded The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and sparked an exodus westward that eventually settled Salt Lake City. Now, 180 years after that divine revelation, thousands of church members are trekking back to the Palmyra area, about 20 miles southeast of Rochester, to visit the birthplace of Mormonism.
Guided by faith and road maps, they arrive in cars and charter buses for a few hours, or a few days, of spiritual rejuvenation. They hike along freshly laid trails in the Sacred Grove and step into the Smith family's re-created log home nearby. A restored printing shop shows where the Book of Mormon was first published, and a visitors center plays a recording of Christ's words in 20 languages, including Hungarian, Finnish and Tahitian.
A new temple overlooking the Sacred Grove draws so many LDS Church members that reservations are taken weeks in advance, and walk-ins often have to be turned away.
"You come in the front door," said Margaret Fuqua, 66, who moved to Palmyra last year from Billings, Mont., with her husband to live near their grandchildren and the temple. "And you lay all your worldly cares aside. It's just such a spiritual feeling of peace and comfort, it feeds your soul."
The thriving LDS community has transformed this rural town of 7,690 into a tourist destination. Though only a few hundred LDS Church members actually live in Palmyra, their faith is displayed everywhere. Shops on Main Street sell postcards, magnets, tote bags and other souvenirs of the Mormon temple. A busy intersection guarded by four mainline churches — Episcopal, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian — has a large blue sign pointing the way to the LDS sites.
And LDS tourists routinely fill the town's restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts (there are no hotels). They are easy to pick out, local residents say, by their dark suits and modest hemlines, polite manners and clean living.
The town supervisor, David Lyon, who is a Methodist, welcomed guests to the Smith log home on a recent snowy night. He then flipped a switch to turn on the Christmas lights.
"The town has worked closely with the Mormon Church for years," he said. "It puts us on the map, and it gives the town an economic boost. It helps all the local businesses except the bars and smoke shop, but the rest are happy."
The farm boy who became the town's most famous resident was once one of its most scorned. In the early 1800s, Palmyra — named after an ancient city in Syria — was a stomping ground for preachers trying to win converts to their churches. It lay in a stretch of western New York known as the "burned-over district" because religious fires had passed through so many times.
As LDS Church members tell the story, Joseph Smith Jr. was agonizing over which church to join when God and Christ appeared to him in the grove. He was told to wait. And three years later, he was awakened one night by the angel Moroni and directed to a nearby hillside. There he unearthed a set of gold plates containing the history of an ancient Israelite people who had been taught the ways of the true church by Christ after his resurrection.
Palmyra residents ridiculed the Book of Mormon as the "gold Bible" and accused Smith of being a fraud, or worse. Less than a year later, the Mormons headed west to settle in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois. But their unconventional beliefs and practices — including polygamy for a while — and their growing numbers were met with opposition and violence.
Smith was murdered by a mob in 1844, and the Mormons split into several factions. The largest of these followed Brigham Young into the desert and built a religious and political stronghold that later became Salt Lake City.
Today, Mormonism has become one of the world's fastest-growing religious movements, with 11 million members. In New York alone, the number of Mormons has increased by 51 percent in the last decade to 60,516, in no small part because of aggressive recruiting by church members.
Yet the LDS Church has also faced unrelenting criticism over its origins in Palmyra. Many religious leaders, scholars and others scoff at Smith's claim that God and Christ appeared in modern times, at least by biblical standards. And they argue that no archaeological record exists of an ancient Israelite civilization in New York, or for that matter, anywhere in America.
Like religious groups before them, the LDS Church members responded by surrounding themselves with tangible symbols like the Sacred Grove, said Jan Shipps, author of "Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons" (University of Illinois Press, 2000). "They were trying to create pilgrimage places," she said. "Places where people could literally go and stand, and say, 'It happened here.' It was a deliberate decision to recapture their history and make it their own."
The church started buying land in the Palmyra area in 1907 and later dispatched a missionary couple, Willard and Rebecca Bean, to reintroduce Mormonism in its birthplace. It was no easy task. Neighbors yelled at them to go home to Utah. Shop owners refused to sell them groceries, so they had to drive to the next town.
But the Beans slowly won friends and converts and stayed for a quarter-century.
They even named their daughter after the town. "I remember my mother would say, 'Just be nice and friendly, and things will change,' " said Palmyra Bean Packer, now 85, who lives in Provo, Utah. "She was right. They just accepted them like anyone else by the time the 25 years were up."
The LDS Church has acquired 984 acres in the Palmyra area valued at $9.8 million, according to local records. The $5 million temple was dedicated in April, and several of the historic sites have been refurbished. In 1998, church workers re-created the Smith family's log home after using infrared aerial photography and geological surveys to pinpoint its location.
The church's annual pageant in Palmyra has also grown into a lavish production, with 600 costumed actors on seven stages and a high-tech sound system. For seven nights, the Book of Mormon comes alive on the hillside where Smith claimed to have unearthed the gold plates.
The free pageant draws as many as 10,000 spectators a night.
Jerry Hess, director of the LDS historic sites here, said many church members are overwhelmed by their emotions when they finally arrive in Palmyra. "During the busy season," he said, "there are tears shed every day."
Others find great joy in following in Smith's footsteps.
"We've been everywhere else," said Judi Butt, 59, a retired paralegal. Her husband, 63, a trainer for fire alarm systems, said, "You can't feel the spirit anywhere more than you can here, where the church was organized."