After Kirtland it was a short-ish drive to our house in New York. Only four hours or so. We got there on Sunday night and were ravenous! I made us a quick dinner and we figured out who would sleep where. Most of the beds were in a big room together upstairs, which was fun.
A toilet in the middle of the room definitely seems wrong! They tried to disguise it with those shelves but it didn't work!
It was a cute little house, though. I loved this yellow and blue room.
And the cute screened porch!
The next day we drove the hour into Palmyra. Clementine falls asleep like this in the car and it seems so funny to me every time! I probably have ten pictures of her like this. Poor lamb, she was so tired from late nights and long drives and weird nap schedules.
Nice Marigolds in front of the Smith Farm visitor's center
Walking past the orchard to the farmhouse
A little glimpse of the temple along the way! I didn't realize it was right here on the Smith Family property. So cool!
Outside the house Alvin Smith built, Goldie and Daisy BOTH found four-leaf clovers.
The first Smith home
Lucy Mack Smith's kitchen. I love kitchens. They had a Bible from 1814 or so on the table—not the Smith Family's actual Bible, but still! I liked thinking about Joseph's family reading the scriptures together here.
Joseph Smith's bedroom—where Moroni appeared to him three times in one night!
A fence like Joseph would have climbed over to get home after Moroni kept him awake all night :)
It's hard to describe the Sacred Grove. We let the older kids split up and hopefully go off and have some moments alone to ponder and think about what happened here. And Sam mostly had the little ones so I could hold the camera and take pictures. But on one level, it is just a pretty walk in the woods. We made the kids whisper so it felt a little more reverent, but Gus and Ziggy were pointing out squirrels and picking up sticks and it didn't feel so different from any other hike in a nice forest. Underneath all that, though, there is a profound silence and reverence there that I'm sure partly comes from inside. I don't know if someone who didn't truly believe in Joseph Smith's experience in the Grove could feel it. I think when I was younger, that overlapping of sacred and mundane bothered me a bit. I didn't WANT to feel the mundane, I didn't WANT everyday thoughts to intrude, and when they did it felt disappointing, like I was behind a window and couldn't quite reach the holiness I wanted to feel.
But I wrote this on Instagram:
"I went to the Sacred Grove as a teenager and was mildly disappointed not to feel something more special about it. This time I felt what I wished to then, probably because in the intervening years I have been hollowed out by experience and joy and sorrow. There is space inside me now for such deep gratitude, such awe at God’s goodness, such peace at seeing how patiently He works with us—young boys, mothers, imperfect disciples—and how He really does call us by name."
And that is really true. I didn't need to be outside of myself or in some special, holy state of mind to feel that deep gratitude. I felt it under everything else that happened, through the constant shush-ing and the kids falling down on the path and the noisy cicadas and losing Junie so someone had to go hunt for her. I felt it as strongly as if I had been all by myself in a silent circle of trees. And I didn't wish for something more because I know God now in ways I didn't as a teenager. I have met Him in my own Sacred Groves and because of that, here in Joseph's Grove, I could just remember and marvel and be grateful. I'm so grateful for that young boy Joseph who prayed, for all he endured and all he sacrificed to bring forth the restored church. But even more, I'm grateful for the God that answered him. I felt it there in the Sacred Grove but I feel it again every day, every time I remember what great things He has done for me and is doing for all His children.
On a less important note, I was probably around Daisy's age? when I visited the Sacred Grove with my family, and my memories of it do not match up with what I saw this time AT ALL. Have they changed it? Planted more trees, let more forest grow, moved the paths, something? In my memory it was a very small little forested area. There weren't multiple paths to explore. You just sort of walked in on one path and then looked around and went out. But now it is a really big area! Lots of people can be in it at the same time and not meet each other at all. It's big enough to get a little lost in, even. Is my memory just faulty? It could well be, but it's weird that nothing seemed familiar to me, not even the Smith cabin!
I'm so glad we got to go here to the Sacred Grove. I hope it was a meaningful experience for the kids too even if they didn't have some huge spiritual experience there!
We drove into the town of Palmyra to see some of the other church sites. Here are the four churches at one intersection I've heard people talk about before! Such a good illustration of the understandable confusion Joseph Smith felt about religion at that time!
We went to the Grandin Print Shop next (after getting lots of ice cream at the "Chill and Grill," of course) and it was really interesting. We like print shops (we saw one in Nauvoo too), and have visited a cool printing museum in Utah that has printing presses from the same time period. This tour wasn't quite as cool as that one because at the Utah museum they actually let us use the press to print some things! And to set the type, too. But here the sister missionaries did show how the whole process worked, and it was good.
Our favorite part was taking these big folio (?)-sized sheets and folding them so the pages come out in the right order. I've always wondered how that works, but you can't really quite understand it until you try it yourself.
Clementine was very delighted with her little folded Book-a-mornin', and also delighted to see this picture of Moroni that is in the current Book of Mormon! She loves to sit next to me when I'm reading my scriptures and read her own Book of Mormon, and she always finds the picture of Jesus, the picture of Joseph Smith, and this picture of Moroni. She was very happy to see a BIG version of the picture!
There was a bookstore next to the print stop and Daisy really wanted to look for a leather first-edition-style Book of Mormon there. She has always wanted to read it like the first saints did, without verses and chapters breaking it up. Sam, lucky for her, wanted one too, so he bought a copy and Daisy immediately started reading it in the car. She was so happy!
By the time we got to the Hill Cumorah, Clementine was tired and fed up with it all, and was crying "I don't WANT to go inside! I don't WANT to see the missionaries!" I stayed out in the car with her for a few minutes while she calmed down. What finally cheered her up was when she noticed the pretty flowers and said, "Take a picture of me by those flowers, Mama!" Then she insisted I take a picture by every single flower pot and flower bed.
She also liked the "soooo many Book-a-mornins" displayed inside. All different languages!
We were mostly so lucky to have great weather on this trip, but it did get a little hot at the Hill Cumorah. It was humid and we felt so sweaty and sticky after we climbed up the hill!
Beautiful view from the hill. Take note of that field of yellow flowers.
This is Daisy in the field of yellow flowers you could see from above. So pretty!
And that was Palmyra! We didn't have time to visit the other sites (the Whitmer farm, the Alvin Smith gravesite, the Palmyra Temple, or the Martin Harris farm) and that was a little sad. We would have liked to see the Erie Canal too, but I forgot it was so close, and everyone was about historic-sited-out by this time anyway. And the Priesthood Restoration site is a couple hours away. So, maybe next time. But we were really happy about the things we did get to see! They were all so good!
We had one more day in the Palmyra area and our stake president had said, when he heard we were going there, "Palmyra? You should go to the Corning Glass Museum!" We loved the glass museum in Tacoma years ago, so I was all for it.
It was such a great museum! We loved it! Kids under 17 are free, thank goodness, so we didn't have to pay for anyone except Sam and me. The town of Corning is known for glass (the Corning factory is there and is the main thing, but I think other glass artisans have gathered there too over the years) but I didn't know the museum would be so good. There was a lot of fascinating stuff to learn about the scientific side of glass. Shatterproof glass, technologies for making glass thinner or stronger, ways to run a current through clear glass and make it opaque by pushing a button, fiberoptic cables, telescope and lighthouse lenses, LCDs. So many applications for glass I hadn't even thought of or considered before. There was even a demonstration about breaking glass—the different ways it breaks and what that means for various uses. They broke a bunch of bottles inside a clear case so we could see how it worked. Super interesting.
This was some sort of hologram-y lens that turned you upside down and let you walk into yourself
Different opacities of "Corningware" ovensafe glass dishes. I have a bunch of these. It was interesting to read about how they developed them.
Then, maybe even better than the exhibits, there were glassblowing demonstrations all day long, and those were SO good. Even the youngest kids loved them. It is magical to see someone make a vase or a pitcher out of just a blob of glass! And they do it so fast! And so expertly! I just wanted to watch the demonstrations again and again (and probably would have, had I been there alone and not had anyone with me getting hungry and tired!).
There was also a huge art side of the museum where there was a gallery of weird ultra-modern glass art. Interesting to look at.
Clementine trotting casually along next to three enormous glass trees. What could go wrong?
Furry glass…bunny?
Cool bird shapes
This one was so pretty. I stared at it for a long time. It's just tiny little shards of glass, paper-thin, all put together in a cube. This picture doesn't even capture how mesmerizing it was and how it changed as it caught the light. It felt like it was appearing and disappearing somehow as you walked around it. Those thin, thin layers of glass remind me of the mineral mica, and they have a kind of pearly look like mica too. But they're so even and delicate all put together like this!
There were also huge galleries devoted to older glass work. There were exhibits of ancient glass beads, Phoenician glass, Art Deco glass, Venetian glass, and a million other things.
I really loved the gallery of cut glass (or crystal?). I have a cake plate like this that's pretty but I'm sure is mass-produced, but this exhibit showed the artistry required to do it all by hand and it was amazing. I never knew there were so many types of cut glass!
After finally dragging ourselves (reluctantly, at least for Sam and me) away from the museum, and after going quickly through the gift shop where I died a thousand deaths worrying that the little kids would break something, and everything there cost a million dollars so I don't know what we would have done if they had—we had some great pizza in the town of Corning. Yum.
The Finger Lakes are so pretty! I have never seen them before, but the whole surrounding area is just beautiful too. I would totally go back and stay in just this area. There were lots of hikes and waterfalls and state parks I would love to have explored!
We also visited an Amish store and got some really good butter and crackers and cheese and yogurt and so forth. There was a huge package of bacon that was so inexpensive, but we didn't get it and now I regret it. It would have been so good! And I wish I'd gotten three more pounds of butter too!
And that's the end of our time in New York!
Thanks for sharing, now I know where I'm going next time I visit Palmyra--I love glass!
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