Pencil drawing from a sketchbook kept on location during Sons of the Utah Pioneers Church History tour in July 2005. Drawing size is 5 1/2 inches by 8 inches, sketched with a 6B pencil in a hardbound sketchbook made by Watson-Guptill.
Drawings are not for sale

The Joseph Smith Sr. family moved to this 100-acre property in western New York around 1818. Joseph Smith Jr. labored with his father and brothers to remove trees and prepare this heavily forested land for farming.

"On the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring" of 1820, young Joseph went into these woods to pray, to a place where he "had previously designed to go."  Here, God the Father and His resurrected Son, Jesus Christ, appeared to Joseph Smith to commence the Restoration of the gospel in the latter days.

Joseph Smith's family moved away from this farm in 1830. The Church acquired the land in the early 1900s. The exact location of Joseph Smith's First Vision is unknown, but it occurred somewhere within a 10-acre forest on the western boundaries of the farm. This forest has been referred to as the Sacred Grove since 1906.