William Smith — Joseph's Brother Who Felt the Plates and Never Denied Their Reality

William Smith (1811–1893) was a younger brother of the Prophet Joseph Smith and one of the more complex figures of early Church history — temperamental, sometimes rebellious, frequently at odds with Church leaders, and eventually excommunicated in 1845. Yet through all of it, he maintained one unshakeable conviction: the plates were real, and he had felt them.

In 1827, when Joseph brought the plates home, William was one of the family members who was allowed to handle them while they were covered. In a June 1884 interview, William described the experience vividly: 'I handled them and I handled them with my hands. I never saw them uncovered, but I handled them and I knew from the hefting of them that they were plates of some metal. They were not wood or stone — they were heavy, like gold.'

In his 1883 work 'William Smith on Mormonism,' he described what he remembered of the plates in detail and maintained his witness of the events surrounding the translation. His testimony is distinctive because he was a family member with daily proximity to the plates during the early period — not an outsider, not someone seeking religious conversion, but a skeptical, sharp-tongued brother who nonetheless acknowledged, under any questioning, that the plates existed.

In an 1870 testimony meeting, William bore his witness of the divine calling of Joseph Smith. A listener recorded: 'He bore his testimony — he could not deny what he had seen and handled. The plates were real. Whatever his difficulties with the Church, whatever estrangements he had experienced, the physical reality of the plates was something he could not walk away from.'

William Smith's testimony is remarkable precisely because of who he was: not a devoted follower, not a man with every incentive to believe, but a difficult, complicated brother who confirmed the tangible reality of the golden plates despite every reason to remain silent or deny.

Fuller account of this event (in the witness’s own words):

We handled them [the plates] and could tell what they were. They were not quite as large as this Bible. Could tell whether they were round or square. Could raise the leaves this way (raising a few leaves of the Bible before him). One could easily tell that they were not stone, hewn out to deceive, or even a block of wood. Being a mixture of gold and copper, they were much heavier than stone, and very much heavier than wood.