Q&A with Larry C. Porter, Interview by Susan Easton Black

Larry C. Porter is a professor emeritus of Church history and doctrine at BYU. Susan Easton Black is a professor of Church history and doctrine at BYU. A longer version of this interview will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Religious Educator.

Q: What circumstances led to your introductory research in the East during the summer of 1968?

A: Truman G. Madsen was at that time the director of the Institute of Mormon Studies at BYU. One of his priority projects was to send researchers into New York and Pennsylvania in a systematic effort to glean the content of documents and sources relating to the Prophet Joseph Smith and the origins of Mormonism. He had a fixed determination to gather everything that could be found, whether pro or con. Knowing of my interests, he invited me to join other “field representatives” in the summer of 1968. Dr. Marvin Hill went to Albany, Albany County, New York. Dr. Milton V. Backman covered such locations as Monroe, Ontario, and Seneca counties in New York.

Driving to Washington DC, I started researching a number of selective subjects at the National Archives. I then visited the Pennsylvania State Archives at Harrisburg. From there, I went north to Wilkes-Barre, home of Rev. George Lane, and on to Montrose, county seat of Susquehanna County. There I began searching the roots of the Prophet’s Harmony experience. Crossing into the state of New York, I visited repositories in Broome and Chenango counties by summer’s end. Truman Madsen and others seemed pleased with the findings of that season. My doctoral committee approved my dissertation prospectus on the topic “Origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in New York and Pennsylvania, 1816–1831.”

Q: I understand that you spent an entire year, 1969–70, living on the Martin Harris farm in Palmyra and using it as a base for an extended research effort.

A: Knowing of my desire to further a more intensive study of the documents in New York and Pennsylvania, Dr. Richard Anderson opened multiple doors. As the Religious Education representative for the Jackling fund at the Harold B. Lee Library, he worked with A. Dean Larson to underwrite a year’s stay in New York for me. It was anticipated that I would acquire the capability to microfilm a variety of sources found in the library and elsewhere. My training in microfilming was arranged through the Genealogical Society in Salt Lake. I was taught the technical aspects of microfilming by Darrell Allmendinger at the Church’s Granite Mountain Vault in Little Cottonwood Canyon. The Genealogical Society was also to provide the processing of the film for distribution to the Lee Library at BYU, the Genealogical Society, and the LDS Church Historical Department in Salt Lake. The New York institutions that provided the documents for filming (libraries, courthouses, etc.), were also to receive a copy as backup for their records.

Dr. Anderson was able to arrange housing for my family in the existing cobblestone home (1849) on the Martin Harris farm in Palmyra. He had been working on an assignment from Elder Marion D. Hanks to identify the precise location of the Peter Whitmer Sr. log home at Fayette in Seneca County as an important historical reference point for the organization of the Church on April 6, 1830. At Dr. Anderson’s recommendation, I was added to the team to assist that project from an on-site perspective. Elder Hanks made it possible for the family to stay at the Harris farm. It was our home, along with two cats given to our children by local Church members. No disrespect intended, we named the kittens Martin and Harris. Both turned out to be female and had large litters of kittens before we left. We gave them all to a dairy farmer who had a serious mouse problem.

Q: Were there some accomplishments from your New York research experience that were particularly memorable?

A: Verification of the exact site of the Peter Whitmer Sr. log home was the net result of institutional and personal efforts on the part of numerous persons. Richard Anderson, who had been meticulously working on the related documentation of that site, was able to arrange for William Lee Powell of Roy, Utah, to fly out from Salt Lake City and meet with Dale Berge of the BYU Anthropology Department and me at the Whitmer farm on September 2, 1969.

William Powell had been a tenant farmer on the Whitmers’ hundred-acre lot from 1946 to 1952. During that time, he had uncovered the laid-rock foundation of the Whitmer home while working his fields and hauling wagon loads of hay into the barn. Powell had the presence of mind to measure the exact distance from the barn to the homesite and take notes of his findings at the time. Although the barn had been destroyed by 1969, he was able to reconstruct the positioning of the laid-rock foundation of the Whitmer log home (now buried from constant plowing of the field), by taking measurements from the remaining foundation of the old silo. He next marked off an area twenty by thirty feet, the original dimensions of the laid-rock foundation located in the 1940s. Dale Berge then laid out his base point and grid, and, with the archaeological crew that he had brought with him from Nauvoo, systematically dug the site and bagged the evidence. The artifacts from the home were right where they were supposed to be.

Further confirmation of this being the correct site of the original Whitmer home was established the following year in 1970 by implementing a beautiful example of oral history to validate the spot. Richard Anderson arranged a meeting of Samuel J. Ferguson of Shiprock, New Mexico, and me at the Peter Whitmer farm on April 20, 1970. As a former presiding elder of the Palmyra Branch (1927), Ferguson had accompanied Andrew Jenson, assistant Church historian, to the Whitmer farm on February 12, 1928. On that occasion Brother Jenson related to Samuel that he had first gone to the farm in 1888, and while there had met with an elderly gentleman in his early nineties, who had come in from a neighboring farm to the north. This aged farmer pointed out to him the precise location of the old Whitmer home, of which only a few log remnants were left to be seen. Now on April 20, 1970, some forty-one years later, Brother Ferguson stood with me on the site and identified the same location once again. This information, coupled with an accumulation of other documentary evidence and an archaeological excavation, was sufficient to validate the correct location. Subsequently, a reconstructed log home was built during 1979–80 and dedicated by President Spencer W. Kimball on April 6, 1980, as part of the sesquicentennial celebration of 150 years of Mormonism.

Q: Wasn’t there yet another site discovery, besides the Whitmer log home, that proved significant?

A: Finding the exact location of the Joseph Smith Sr. log home site in Palmyra Township was a happy bonus. I had been told to be on the watch for any documentation disclosing the whereabouts of the Smith home. In the process of reading through the Palmyra Town Record Book, I ran on to a report of two Palmyra commissioners of highways who were laying out a roadway on Stafford Road in Palmyra Township in 1820. On June 13, 1820, they got out the “poor old town compass” and marked a spot in the center of the road on the south line of Township 12 and Range 2. They then shot an azimuth and calculated the measurement to be “three rods fourteen links southeast of Joseph Smith’s dwelling house”—what a providential entry! I showed the site and reading to Dale Berge in 1970.

Years later, discussions of the location with LaMar Berrett resulted in the necessary funding, and Dr. Berge dug the site with his crew in 1982. Remains of the old Smith log house foundation and accompanying artifacts were right there. In 1997, T. Michael Smith, assisted by Donald L. Enders, both of the Church Historical Department, excavated the site again in an expanded dig and uncovered additional evidence. The reconstructed log house of the Smiths was dedicated by President Gordon B. Hinckley on March 27, 1998.

Q: Since retiring from the university, how have you kept involved in Church history?

A: In the summer of 2001, just before my retirement from BYU, Elder Neal A. Maxwell and other General Authorities met with a number of historians in the conference room of the Abraham O. Smoot Building. There Elder Maxwell announced the approval by the First Presidency of the Joseph Smith Papers Project. After describing the nature of the project, he invited those present to become participants in the publication of the holograph papers of the Prophet. We were all electrified by the prospects of such an undertaking.

I worked on the project on a daily basis for the next four and a-half years before accepting a call for LaDawn and myself to serve in the New York Rochester Mission at the Hill Cumorah sites (five historic sites in Ontario, Wayne, and Seneca counties). Since returning home I have continued to do some review and source work on the Joseph Smith Papers along with several pertinent projects with university colleagues. It has also been great to get back to Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania to research some additional subjects of particular interest.