George Edward Anderson's Photographic Mission — Preserving Sacred Sites on 'Plates of Glass'

George Edward Anderson (1860–1928) was a Utah photographer with a divine sense of mission. At a time when no photographs of Church historic sites from Joseph Smith's lifetime existed, Anderson felt compelled to create a visual record before those sacred places vanished entirely. What followed was one of the most remarkable and spiritually motivated documentary projects in Latter-day Saint history.

In 1907, Anderson began an extraordinary journey — not just to England to serve a proselyting mission, but to the founding sites of the Restoration along the way. Traveling through Vermont, New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Pennsylvania, he photographed the Sacred Grove, Joseph Smith's birthplace in Sharon, Vermont, the Susquehanna River where the Aaronic Priesthood was restored, the Martin Harris farm, the Kirtland Temple, and dozens of other locations where heaven had touched earth.

Anderson spent years gathering these images on large glass plate negatives — a laborious, expensive, and physically demanding process. His photographs are now recognized as irreplaceable treasures: the earliest visual documentation of many sites that would otherwise exist only in written descriptions. Church historian's have called his collection foundational to Latter-day Saint historical memory.

He returned again on a second mission from 1909 to 1913, continuing to document Church sites in Britain, New England, and across the American East. His title for this work was inspired: 'A History and Record on Plates of Glass' — an intentional echo of the divine record Joseph Smith had translated from ancient plates. Anderson saw his glass-plate photography as a parallel mission of preservation.

In 1911, Anderson was commissioned to photograph the entire process of the Oliver Cowdery Monument dedication in Richmond, Missouri — the event described in the BYU Studies Quarterly article. His photographs of the unveiling ceremony, the monument, and the participants are now held in the Church Archives and were published publicly for the first time in 2005.

Anderson's life mission — driven by faith, funded largely at personal sacrifice, and carried out across thousands of miles — ensured that future generations could see the actual fields, rivers, forests, and buildings where the Restoration unfolded. He is remembered as the first Latter-day Saint to professionally photograph Church historic sites.