William S. Sayre: Non-Member Who Recorded Martin Harris's Testimony About the Gold Plates (1829)

William S. Sayre was not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was a contemporary of Martin Harris in the Palmyra, New York area in the late 1820s and early 1830s.

In 1829 — the very year that the Book of Mormon translation was being completed and the Three Witnesses received their heavenly witness — William S. Sayre had personal contact with Martin Harris and recorded an account of what Harris told him about the golden plates and Joseph Smith.

Sayre later wrote: Joseph Smith 'would not let him [Harris] see the plates.' This brief account, preserved in Early Mormon Documents, captures the intensity of Harris's conviction at a moment when only a handful of people in the world had any knowledge of the plates.

Sayre's account is historically significant precisely because he was an outsider — a non-member who had no religious motivation to exaggerate or fabricate. His record of Martin Harris's testimony in 1829 serves as independent corroboration that Harris was actively and publicly speaking about the gold plates to people around him, before the Church was even organized, before the Three Witnesses received their angelic vision, and well before there would have been any social benefit to such a claim.

Sayre's letter, written August 31, 1878, to James T. Cobb, was published in Early Mormon Documents (Vol. 4, p. 145), edited by Dan Vogel, as part of the historical record surrounding the founding claims of the Restoration.