A Granite Shaft, One Foot for Every Year He Lived

Joseph Smith was born in Sharon, Vermont on December 23, 1805, and although his family moved to New York before the visions that founded Mormonism began, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints marked the site emphatically once it turned its attention to preserving its own founding history. In 1905, on the centennial of Smith's birth, the church sent Junius Wells to Vermont to purchase the birthplace land, design a monument and oversee its construction, and the result was a single solid granite shaft, quarried whole from Barre, Vermont and standing thirty eight and a half feet tall, one foot for every year of Smith's life before his 1844 murder in Illinois. The monument remains one of the largest single pieces of flawless granite ever cut, and it now anchors a Latter day Saint historic site and pilgrimage destination that draws visitors to a small Vermont town most of whose current residents belong to entirely different traditions.

Vermont's own religious trajectory moved in something close to the opposite direction from what that monument commemorates, its Congregationalist colonial churches giving way over the twentieth century to one of the least religiously affiliated populations in the country. Karme Choling, a Tibetan Buddhist retreat center the teacher Chogyam Trungpa founded in Barnet in 1970, helped establish Vermont as an early hub of American Buddhist practice. Nothing in Particular leads the state today at twenty nine percent of adults, per Pew's 2023-24 study, ahead of Mainline Protestant at seventeen.