Title: Joseph and Lucy Smith’s Tunbridge Farm: An Archaeology and Landscape Study
Authors: Mark L. Staker and Donald L. Enders
Publisher: John Whitmer Books, Independence, MO, www.jwha.info
Genre: Archaeology, Family History, LDS History
Year Published: 2021
Number of Pages: 113
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 9781934901212
Price: $14.95
Reviewed by Harlow Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
A few years ago, I saw a story on the news about a group of archaeologists in Southern Utah hurrying to excavate a site as quickly as they could before the road-building equipment got there to destroy it. I mentioned it a few years later to a coworker who had majored in Archaeology. I think she said she had been on that dig or knew people who had.
Just a couple of weeks ago at our Zoom meeting activity, a new content strategist said he was an archaeologist and had spent four years at Petra Jordan. He regaled us with the geographic anomalies of the Petra scenes in Indiana Jones. (What attracts archaeologists to internet marketing? Gotta support the habit.)
And back when I was teaching Sunday School at the care center where I clerk for the branch president, one resident’s granddaughter told me she had been excavating a medieval church cemetery in Eastern Europe where clay had preserved the bodies well.
But archaeology doesn’t always deal with the distant past, or even sites hundreds of years old, inhabitants long gone and known only through artifacts or skeletons. Archaeologists can work with sites just over 200 years old, which have records recorded in deed books, account books, and family and local histories. All of these enrich Mark Staker and Donald Enders’s landscape and archaeology study of Joseph and Lucy Smith’s Tunbridge Farm: An Archaeology and Landscape Study.
Some of the richest insights I found in the Acknowledgements page. The first paragraph acknowledges research grants and other help, and ends, “Most of the research, however, was funded through frequent flyer miles, vacation days, and personal funds. The third paragraph thanks “Church Service Missionaries working at the Joseph Smith Birthplace” who “gave up their shopping day,” and “members of the Montpelier Stake, especially the South Royalton Ward,” who “worked hot days covered in dirt from crown to foot helping dig the site.”
Archaeology is a community effort, both an effort to learn about a community, and an act of community, an act of uncovering, detailing, and preserving the history of people who can no longer record and preserve their own. And the details lend nuance to things we’ve long known but not known in depth.
From high school, back in the mid-seventies, I remember a film where one of the characters mentioned the fact that women in the 19th Century could not own property in their own names. But they weren’t powerless. In Chapter Two Staker and Enders talk about Asael Smith’s negotiations to get land for his son and new daughter-in-law. They mention that, per coverture laws at the time, a husband could not sell land without his wife signing over her widow’s portion, a third of the land. Asael and Mary’s deed does not have the signature of Elias Stevens’ wife, so the deed could have been challenged in court. And when Asael and Mary sold the land, Mary’s signature isn’t on the deed. Staker and Enders suggest this may have to do with Asael’s lack of experience and knowledge of the law.
Another area of women’s power was the dairy, which gave them considerable influence over what kind of livestock the family bought. The authors say we can tell some of the hillside was used for grazing because it has little bumps and hillocks on it where trees fell and their stumps rotted. If the trees had been cut to plow the field the stumps would have been removed and the hillside plowed smooth.
A poignant detail mentioned in the book is the black cherry tree growing up through the foundations of the farmhouse. The detail is interesting for lots of reasons, first being that the house and industrial buildings were still standing when George Edward Anderson took the uncredited cover photo more than 100 years after the Smiths left. We learn from a conversation with a local dairyman that black cherry leaves were poisonous to cattle, so there wouldn’t have been any growing in the pasture, rather they would have been in the family cemetery. And there shouldn’t have been a cherry tree growing up through the house. The authors share a brief lament for the hundreds of homes abandoned back in the Vermont hills as the area lost population.
Joseph and Lucy Smith’s Tunbridge Farm has wonderful details about things like what the shape of nails can tell us about the purpose of the industrial building adjacent to the farmhouse—and what the foundation stones, some weighing more than a ton, can tell us about the building’s purpose.
We’re fortunate not only to have the site to sift through (except the corner of the farmhouse that sits under a road), but also records like deeds and promissory notes and family histories. The authors repeat the story about Asael Smith giving Joseph a copy of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, saying, “Read this book till you believe it.”
The authors also retell Lucy’s dream of two trees, one pliable and bending with the breeze, and one straight and tall resisting the breeze. The pliable tree represented Joseph, and the stubborn unbending tree his brother Jesse. Willingness to bend with the Spirit is not the only contrast between Joseph and Jesse. Reading Tunbridge Farm I learned that Jesse’s father-in-law, Benjamin Peabody, invested heavily in properties on the Smith Settlement, but he wasn’t the only investor in his family. His younger brother Joseph “would eventually become the richest shipping magnate in the world” (p. 50). The Peabody name is attached to various museums and institutions in the East. I’m not sure how they relate to Joseph Peabody, but Jesse Smith’s connection to a wealthy family is a great contrast to Joseph and Lucy’s poverty.
The last chapter examines the connection between the farm and Lucy Smith’s first vision, attempting to find the place where the vision occurred. In setting up the background the authors shine light on the differences in Joseph and Lucy’s religious beliefs. Joseph Jr. doesn’t say there was religious tension in his parents’ marriage, only that his mother and several of his siblings joined the Presbyterians, and he became partial to the Methodists, and a Methodist preacher mocked his vision. There’s a deep irony in that mockery. Asael’s gift of Common Sense to his children suggests he was a rationalist, a Universalist indeed, and it looks like Joseph shared the belief in universal salvation, even if his belief in Christ’s divinity didn’t please his father. Lucy, on the other hand, came from a mountain culture that “embraced dreams and visions as sources of inspiration and guidance” (p. 60). The enthusiastic Shouting Methodists sending circuit riders into Vermont at the time contrasted with the circuit-riding Universalist Hosea Ballou.
Which brings us to the deep irony in the Methodist preacher’s mockery. His religion had become respectable. Or maybe his branch of Methodism was at odds with the Shouting Methodists, who would have been an embarrassment to him. So the religion that would have been compatible with Lucy’s early experiences rejected her son’s visions.
The book ends by examining Lucy and Joseph’s dreams, foreshadowing his move from rational Unitarian to visionary, his movement towards Lucy’s religious manner. Though Lucy recorded his dreams, he may have written them first, as the third to last footnote suggests, with Lucy drawing on his written account. The next footnote looks at the original ordering of Lucy’s history, which makes it clear she was comparing herself and Joseph in their journeyings to father Lehi, whose wife, Sariah, complained about him being a visionary man.
Joseph and Lucy Smith’s Tunbridge Farm is a rich book, with lots of details in the 39 pages of footnotes and in the 70 pages of text. You’ll get a good sense of the kinds of things you can find in old town records, and old family records, how archaeologists and historians research events, and how events and landscape become part of a family’s vision.