Critics claim that either there never were gold plates and Joseph convinced the witnesses to lie with him, or that Joseph Smith made fake plates that fooled the Book of Mormon witnesses.

But how do you explain the evidence from people who were never supposed to be witnesses of the authenticity of the gold plates at all?

The Stone Box and the Hole in The Hill

The formal Three and Eight Witnesses were deliberately shown the gold plates so they could testify to the world that there was a real, authentic, ancient record. But there is also another trail of evidence that Joseph never acknowledged or tried to point to as evidence.

If Joseph Smith really took plates out of a stone box in the side of a hill, there would be a problem for anyone trying to keep the story quiet. The hill and the hole would remain.

Locals did go up to the hill and examine it.

And how did they react?

They didn’t act like people mocking someone for telling a fairy tale about angelic visitations.

They reacted like entitled treasure hunters jealous that someone else found it first.

These Palmyra locals saw the stone box and signs that something had actually been taken out of the hill.

Accounts of the Repository

The 1838 Joseph Smith history (which was published in 1842) describes that the gold plates were found in a stone box on the west side of the hill near the top. He described a large stone covering it, with the middle visible above the ground and the edges covered with earth. Joseph said the box itself was made of stones laid together in some kind of cement, with two stones laid crosswise in the bottom, and the plates resting on them.

In 1835, Oliver Cowdery wrote a letter to W.W. Phelps describing when he had visited the retrieval spot in 1830. He described a hole dug to sufficient depth, a bottom stone laid flat, cement set around the edges, four side stones standing upright, and the whole thing cemented tightly enough to keep outside moisture from entering.

Both these key figures in the production of the Book of Mormon claimed that the Gold plates were taken them from a real, constructed repository in a real hill in New York that was 2.5 miles from Joseph Smiths home.

But what about those that weren’t part of the production of the Book of Mormon?

The Strange Behavior of The Residents of Palmyra

We know from Joseph Smith History, that when Joseph tried to share the story of his Heavenly visitations he was mocked, scoffed, persecuted, and ridiculed. The people thought he was a lunatic.

So why, if they assumed Joseph was lying, did so many people around Palmyra act like he had found something real and try so hard to get it from him?

How do the stories of all the persecution and attempts at theft make sense unless they had some tangible evidence, something to make them believe that they weren’t just being fooled by the guy they already thought was crazy.

They Saw The Evidence

The answer is that they saw evidence of where the plates had come from.

Locals in Palmyra knew Joseph Smith had worked for Josiah Stowell in a quest to find hidden treasure. They also knew the Smith family was poor. If Joseph had really found a heavy metallic artifact in a hill, they felt entitled to it.

According to Joshua Gehly in Witnessing Miracles: Historical Evidence for the Resurrection and the Book of Mormon, the first real opposition to the work of the Restoration came from people who believed Joseph Smith had found something and wanted a share of it.

Once it became known that he had the plates, Joseph said that “the most strenuous exertions” were used to get them from him, and that every stratagem that could be invented was used for that purpose.

That reaction only makes sense if these men thought Joseph really had something physical. Something more than a vision from an angel they did not believe.

The Empty Stone Box on the West Side Near the Summit

The hill we now call Cumorah was close enough for locals to inspect for themselves. It sits about four miles from Palmyra. Gehly points to this as one of the most overlooked facts in the story. The plates were hidden. Joseph did not allow just anyone to see them. But the box they came from remained behind. People could inspect the place they were taken from including the stone slabs and the excavated hole.

According to Gehly, there are sixteen known sources discussing the hill and opening Nine describe a hole, and five specifically descrige a stone box.

Joseph and Oliver both gave the same specific location: the west side of the hill near the top.

Additional Witnesses of the Location

In 1871, Edward Stevenson, a president of the Seventy, visited Palmyra and asked an old local resident about the location. The man pointed out the same place near the summit on the west side. The old man likely had never read Joseph Smith History to hear where Joseph Smith said it was hidden. He knew the spot from personal experience.

A fourth source is Lorenzo Saunders, a Palmyra local who opposed Joseph. While trying to attack Joseph Smith, he told about the time where he and others searched the hill in 1827 and found a large man-made hole. In another statement, he placed that search on the west side of the hill, matching the location given by Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery.

He said he went to the hill with five or six other men and that the hole they found had been dug a year or two before, that there was no fresh dirt. He assumed that the lack of fresh dirt was evidence against Joseph taking the plates from that spot in 1827.

But it actually confirms the historical account.

Joseph first uncovered the box in 1823. That is when the main digging would have been done, clearing the ground and uncovering the container from hundreds of years of overgrowth. The retrieval work needed in the following years would have been minimal when Joseph returned each year, while the plates remained in the hill until he was finally allowed to take them in 1827.

By the time the hostile locals went up after Joseph had removed the plates, there would not necessarily be fresh dirt from a new excavation. There would be an already known man-made opening in the right place just as Saunders described.

A hostile witness went to the hill looking to disprove Joseph and ended up preserving one of the most useful details in the whole story.

The location keeps repeating because many people had seen the spot themselves and shared that knowledge with others in the community.

David Whitmer and The Enemy Testimony

David Whitmer had not even met Joseph Smith before he invited Joseph, Emma, and Oliver to live with Him while they translated the rest of the Book of Mormon after the persecution in Palmyra got too severe.

So, how did David Whitmer get drawn into this?

According to Gehly’s book, David was on a business trip to Palmyra in 1828 when he heard rumors and had conversations with several young men who told him Joseph certainly had golden plates. These men claimed that before Joseph obtained them he had promised to share with them but had not done so.

When David asked how they knew Joseph had the plates, they replied that they had seen the place in the hill where he took them out. David said these men were so positive in their statements that he began to believe there must be some foundation for the stories circulating all over that part of the country.

In another interview, David said the community was “alive with excitement over Joseph finding a great treasure,” and people told him they knew Joseph had the plates because they had seen the place on the hill he had taken them from.

David Whitmer first took the story seriously because hostile locals were certain they had seen the place where the “treasure” had been buried.

After that, David discussed it with Oliver Cowdery. Oliver, who had already received a spiritual confirmation after living with the Smith family, decided to visit Joseph Smith in Harmony, PA and assist in the work. Whitmer was very interested that insisted Cowdery write to him describing his encounter with Joseph and whether the work and the story were real.

Eventually, David helped move Joseph and Oliver to Fayette, where the translation was completed and where David himself would later become one of the Three Witnesses.

In some ways, Joseph’s enemies, without meaning to, helped build the path that led two of the Three Witnesses toward the work. Convinced by the evidence they had seen at the hole in the hill, they gave the very testimony that first made men like David Whitmer take the story seriously.

Attempts to Get The Plates

Gehly says Joseph’s former treasure-seeking associates had seen enough evidence to be convinced the treasure was real. That conviction lead to increased persecution, made it far more difficult for Joseph to safely protect and translate the plates, and ultimately forced Joseph and Emma to leave Palmyra.

After first taking the plates from the stone box in the hill, Joseph hid them in a hollow birch log on the same hill until he could find a more secure place to keep them. He wanted a secure lock box to store them. While he was away working, a plot to steal them developed, and Joseph Smith Sr. heard about it. He told Emma, who rushed to warn Joseph. Joseph returned to the hill, wrapped the plates in his work frock, and was attacked on the way home. He made it back exhausted, bruised, and with a dislocated thumb.

And that was only the beginning.

The Smith house became the target. There were repeated attempts to ransack the property and find the plates. Armed men came. Intruders ripped up the floor of the cooper shop and destroyed the empty wooden box being used as a decoy, but still failed to find the hidden plates. Because of these repeated attempts, Joseph kept changing the hiding places. At different times the plates were hidden under the hearth, in the flax in the cooper shop loft, and in other places while mobs searched the property.

The people around Palmyra were convinced Joseph had a physical treasure. This is not the behavior of a town that thought Joseph had only claimed some imaginary religious experience.

With all this persecution, if Joseph was just making things up, this would have been the perfect time to abandon the project and admit there were no plates in order to stop the mobs and attacks.

Joseph Knight’s report about Samuel Lawrence

Samuel T. Lawrence, was a Palmyra-area resident and treasure seeker who was likely part of a Spanish silver mine treasure quest that included Joseph Smith.

Joseph Knight Sr. gives an account of the events during this time. He said Samuel Lawrence “had Bin to the hill and knew about the things in the hill and he was trying to obtain them.”

Lawrence had been to the hill. He knew about the things that had been buried in the hill and was now trying to get them. He was so convinced that Joseph had gold plates that he hired a divining rodsman to help him locate the treasure on the Smith property.

After that failed, he attempted to negotiate with Joseph Smith to help him sell the treasure for a share of the profits.

The Move to Pennsylvania

The persecution was so serious that Joseph and Emma had to leave New York for Harmony, Pennsylvania where they would live with Emma’s family, which included her father Isaac Hale who despised Joseph.

When word got out that they were leaving, another mob threatened that Joseph would never leave until he had shown the plates. The plates had to be smuggled out. Martin Harris helped hide them in the middle of a barrel of beans. He described how he hefted the box and knew from the weight that it was lead or gold, and he knew Joseph had not had the money to buy that much lead.

Even in Harmony, 160 miles from Palmyra and the Hill Cumorah, the persecution and quest to obtain the treasure from the hill did not stop.

Lucy Harris’s Attempt to Get the Plates

Lucy Harris did not approve of Martin’s support for Joseph Smith or his work assisting with the translation. But, she still acted as though the plates existed. In early 1828, Lucy Harris invited herself to visit Harmony with Martin. She demanded to see the plates, searched the house, going through cupboards and turning things over, and then searched the property, digging in places where she thought they might be hidden. After several days with no success, she left in frustration and returned to Palmyra by stagecoach.

Martin stayed in Palmyra and was the principle scribe for the translation of the Book of Lehi, for the record that is now known as the “Lost 116 pages”

People Who Handled the Plates

While all of this was happening with moving and hiding the plates, many people had physical contact with the covered plates and served as additional witnesses of their reality.

Lucy Mack Smith said she hefted and handled them.

Sally Parker helps strengthens Lucy’s testimony with a contemporary account. She was a neighbor of the Smiths and wrote a letter to a friend that described what Lucy had told her, that the plates were kept in the house and sometimes in the woods for about eight months because people were trying to get them. Lucy said they even hid them under the hearth by lifting the brick and putting them beneath it.

Katherine Smith Salisbury Joseph’s sister, felt the plates through the cloth and heard the metallic leaves clink together. Gehly says she helped Joseph when he first brought them home, putting her among the earliest people to handle them after Joseph himself.

Emma Smith traced their outline through cloth and described them as pliable like thick paper, with a metallic rustling sound when the edges were moved with the thumb.

Isaac Hale, Joseph’s skeptical father-in-law, never believed Joseph’s claims, but he still admitted he held the wooden box and felt its weight when he was told the plates were inside.

Then there is Josiah Stowell.

If anyone should have turned against Joseph, it was Stowell. He was the one who hired Joseph in 1825 to help search for a supposed Spanish silver mine. Stowell sincerely believed Joseph had a gift with a seer stone. They never found the treasure they were looking for, and Joseph eventually helped convince Stowell to abandon the effort. Stowell’s own nephew accused Joseph of disorderly conduct and concluded that Joseph had deceived him.

Yet Stowell continued to trust Joseph and was interested in his spiritual work. He was at the Smith home the night Joseph brought the plates home, and after the Church was organized became one of the early members.

In June 1830, shortly after the church was organized and rapidly growing, a lawsuit was brought against Joseph Smith in Broome County, New York. Samuel Dickinson and protestant ministers accused Joseph of “breaching the peace by using a seer stone to find hidden treasure.”

Stowell was one of the witnesses. Under oath, he testified that he had seen a corner of the object the night Joseph brought it home. He described it as greenish, about a foot square and six inches thick, with gold leaves and characters on them. He said Joseph did not know he had seen it.

After Stowell’s testimony, the case was dismissed.

What Happened to the Box?

Later reports say the stone box itself remained visible for years after the plates were removed.

David Whitmer said the casket eventually washed down to the foot of the hill, though it could still be seen when he last visited.

A separate report came from Edward Stevenson. In 1870, Stevenson visited the Cumorah area and questioned an old local resident who lived near the hill. That man pointed out where the stone box had been and said he had seen good-sized flat stones that had rolled down and lay near the bottom of the hill after the contents were removed. He added that the stones had later been taken away.

What makes these two reports especially interesting is that they came through different lines that could not have collaborated. Stevenson said he gathered his local report in 1870 while in Palmyra. Whitmer’s published statement appeared in 1875 while he was living in Missouri. That means Whitmer’s published account could not have been borrowed from Stevenson’s later published reminiscence.

The two accounts preserve the same basic memory independently: the box did not just disappear from local knowledge. People remembered where it had been, and they also remembered what became of it after it was likely vandalized and then left exposed to the elements.

People remembered where Joseph said he got the plates and what became of the stone box.

The Solution to the Mystery

When you read the story backward, it sounds strange. Why all the mobs? Why the ambush? Why the searches? Why the diviners? Why the threats? Why the desperate hiding of the plates under the hearth, in the woods, in the cooper shop, in a barrel of beans?

Because of all the witnesses of the hole in the hill it makes sense.

Joseph Smith said he took a valuable metallic artifact from a stone box in a known hill near Palmyra.

Local men went to the hill.

They saw the place.

They saw enough to conclude Joseph had actually found something.

And once they believed that, they acted exactly like men who thought another man had gotten treasure they wanted.

That is the overlooked clue. The hill itself kept talking. The empty stone box, the hole in the ground, the west side near the summit, the hostile searches, the attempts to pry out more, the later memory of the stones washing downhill, the local men telling David Whitmer they had seen the place. All of it points in the same direction.

Joseph may have restricted who could see the plates, but he did not control the hill.

And the hill is one reason so many people around him were convinced he that the Gold plates were real.

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