Episode 3: The Smith Family

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:02)
Okay, so the scene is 1805 in the little township of Royalton, Vermont. It's December and it's cold.
Anyone that's been in Vermont knows that you can expect long, humid summers and cold, snowy winters with snow in the trees of maple and birch and beach. You've got pine trees everywhere. It's thick with growth. It would have been a cold winter in a small log cabin. After the failed ginseng venture and Lucy Mack Smith losing her large wedding dowry, which we covered in last episode, the Smiths would find themselves in the beginnings of a poverty cycle. It was hard enough to be on the frontier, but to be poor on the frontier was another story. Over the course of the next 14 years, the family would move seven times. The farm they were renting would be sold. They would hear of a better opportunity somewhere and off they would go, trying to seek out a new way to eke out a living. During this period, they never moved far and extended family was always nearby, but they did move a lot. One of their little stops found them in the little township of Vermont. It was there two days before Christmas in 1805 that Lucy would give birth to a son they named after his father, Joseph.
It's this birth that would change the course of history for millions of people, and the family's identity would be forever tied up with the fate of this child.
Hi, this is Lindsay Hansen Park.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:17)
And this is Bryan Buchanan.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:18)
Bringing you the story of Mormonism from the shadow of the Everlasting Hills, straight out of Zion. This isn't your grandpa's Mormon history.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:46)
This is the tale of Mormon saints and sinners from our roots until present day.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:51)
Gird your loins, lock your hearts, and pay your tithing, because we're bringing you the story of Mormonism in all its paradisiacal glory.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:59)
It's the Sunstone History Podcast.
It's interesting that like the protagonist Nephi in the work of scripture he would produce, the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith, Jr. wasn't the oldest child, but he certainly would do the most to shape the course of this family. He had three older siblings, Alden, Hiram, and Sophronia, and five more would come later, Samuel, William, Katharine, Don Carlos, and Lucy. The family did what they could to provide for themselves. We mentioned a little bit last time that they brewed and sold root beer. Lucy did kind of folksy oilcloth paintings, and Joseph Smith, Sr. taught school off and on, and they'd managed to survive somehow. In talking about the struggle for providing for a family at this time, historian Richard Bushman noted, adult life was a race to accumulate sufficient goods to give the children a start, and still have enough to be independent and comfortable in old age.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (4:20)
It's already hard to eke out a living. Lucy would have had money, her new husband lost it all in this crazy ginseng craze, and now they're surviving on cottage industries, what they can make. And the Smith family would survive pretty well until Joseph Smith Jr. was six years old. It would be that year that an epidemic of typhoid fever raged through the area. Typhoid fever caused by bacteria is a disease that spreads easily due to contamination, in a time when sanitation was not only not understood, it was practically non-existent. And the Smith family would not be immune, they were hit pretty hard. Joseph Smith's older sister Sophronia was given up and thought to be dead at one point. Following the fever period, Joseph Jr. would have a large sore that would develop, and 20 years later Joseph remembered that the doctors, not knowing what else to do, quote, freely applied the hot shovel, which did no good. So you can imagine having an open sore and doctors who are just people on the frontier making their own, sticking a shovel in the fire and then sticking it on your wound.
Not fun. When the sore was finally cut open, and this is gross, so buckle up, Lucy noted that, quote, it discharged fully a quart of matter.
I do a lot of canning in a quart jars a lot, but I don't want to know what that matter was. This sore healed, but then an infection developed in his shin. So, fun facts, folks, don't put hot shovels on open wounds.

**Bryan Buchanan** (5:48)
Medical treatment for this type of infection was usually just to amputate the armor leg.
Coincidentally, however, Smith family lived just a few miles from Dartmouth Medical College, where the resident surgeon, Nathan Smith, apparently no relation to them, had been developing this revolutionary cure for this illness. So his treatment…