David Whitmer's Fields Mysteriously Plowed Overnight — Enabling the Move That Finished the Book of Mormon (1829)

In the late spring of 1829, as Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon in Harmony, Pennsylvania, persecution around the Smith home grew dangerous. Threats became increasingly common, and hostile neighbors in Harmony were becoming aggressive enough that Emma's family seemed to be the only thing standing between the Smiths and injury or death.

During this crisis, Oliver Cowdery wrote to his friend David Whitmer in Fayette, New York, telling him about the translation and asking him to bring his team of horses and his wagon to Harmony to move Joseph, Oliver, and Emma to a safer place — the Whitmer family farm in Fayette. Knowing the burden this would place on the family, David laid the request before his parents and siblings, who decided that despite the sacrifice, taking the small group in was the right thing to do.

But David could not simply leave. It was the season when the wheat the family depended on for survival had to be planted, and his father, Peter Whitmer Sr., reminded him that he still needed to plow and fertilize his fields before going. His father also counseled him to pray to know whether he should leave immediately. David did so, and received the impression from the Spirit that he should finish his work before making the trip to Harmony.

Then something miraculous happened. David later recalled: "I was pressed with my work. I had some 20 acres to plow, and so I concluded I would finish plowing, and then go." The next day, he testified, "on going to the field I found between 5 and 7 acres of my ground had been plowed during the night. I don't know who did it, but it was done, just as I would have done it myself, and the plow was left standing in the furrow."

Lucy Mack Smith later recorded a corroborating detail: three men whom the Whitmers did not know came and worked the fields. They had not been invited, never explained who they were or why they had come, and left without asking for any payment.

Whatever hands performed the work, the effect was unmistakable: the burden that had kept David at home was lifted in a single night, and he was free to set out for Harmony at once. With his team and wagon he moved Joseph, Emma, and Oliver to Fayette, where the translation of the Book of Mormon was completed in the Whitmer home, the Three Witnesses received their heavenly manifestation, and the Church itself was organized in that same house on April 6, 1830. It stands as a quiet illustration of the principle "by small and simple things are great things brought to pass" (Alma 37:6) — a simple act of timely help, unnoticed by the world, that furthered the coming forth of the Book of Mormon.