Kinderhook plates: Examining a nineteenth-century hoax, The

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2003 by Peters, Jason Frederick

Located some sixty miles south of Nauvoo, Pike County constituted a major part of the "Military Tract," a section of land north of the intersection of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers granted to the veterans of the War of 1812 by President James Monroe in 1817.15 Settlers began to move into the area in the early 1820s and, by the mid-1830s, several small villages, including Pittsfield, Atlas, Barry, and Kinderhook, were established. During the late 1830s a Mormon influence began to take shape in Pike County. Mormontown, about two miles east of Pittsfield in the eastern part of the county, claimed four hundred voters by 1845.16 Another church a few miles south of Kinderhook, in the western part of the county, claimed a congregation of over one hundred members in the early 1840s.17

Officially established in April of 1836 by New Yorkers Bridge Whitten and Chester Churchill, Kinderhook had grown gradually in population since the earliest settlers in the late 1820s. By 1840, it was a self-sufficient, thriving little village. A post office, church, school, blacksmith, mill, as well as a few merchants all supported this growth as well as the subsistence farmers of the surrounding area.18 Consisting mainly of easterners from New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, the village of Kinderhook was situated on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi river.19 Scattered along the bluff and throughout the bottomlands were the remnants of the not too distant, earlier Indian settlements. Indeed, Indian burial mounds peppered the sides of the bluffs for miles. Although many of these areas were popular with relic hunters, they were generally avoided by the newcomers.

While farming was the most common occupation, Kinderhook's proximity to the Mississippi River allowed the villagers access to the commercial trade of the river as well as a reasonable amount of contact with nearby Hannibal, Missouri and Quincy, Illinois. This allowed the merchants and citizens of Kinderhook to obtain products and information sooner than more isolated settlements. Although some of the early settlers would have at least heard of the Mormons, there is little evidence of Mormon influence in the village itself. Baptist and Methodist churches dominated the landscape and the villagers remained outsiders to the Mormon movement.

Joseph Smith himself had passed through Pike County in June of 1834 on his way to rescue Mormon settlers in Missouri. In a vision on a mound near Pittsfield, Smith claimed to have learned the name of the man who was buried there. He identified the man as Zelph, a Lamanite, and the mound has kept this name ever since.20 Before leaving Illinois, the Mormon group camped near Atlas, some fifteen miles south of the settlers at Kinderhook.21 Although Smith and his group did not stay in Pike County, Mormonism soon entered the area.

By the early 1840s, Mormon churches had begun to pepper the Pike County landscape and began spreading the Mormon message. Many of these Mormons may have brought their faith with them to the area, but missionary work and pamphlets spread the word of the church as well. The most important of these early Mormon pamphlets was Parley P. Pratt's A Voice of Warning and Instruction to all People, or, An Introduction to the faith and Doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The publication contained a synthesis of the Mormon theology based around Biblical prophecy with a sprinkling of "end-times" millennialism. The pamphlet was one of the earliest Mormon publications to be circulated, aside from Joseph Smith's original Mormon canon. Parley Pratt traveled extensively and devoted a great deal of his life to missionary work.22 By 1846 Pratt claimed that over thirteen thousand copies of A Voice of Warning were in circulation; and one of the copies would end up in the village of Kinderhook.23