Palmyra and Kirtland

The real reason I took the kids on the super long road trip was to stop and visit some of the church history sites.  I had heard of kids going on church history trips when they were teenagers and I was always jealous of them.  Joe's family lives very close to a lot of the church history sites, so we could visit them along the way.  Our first site was Palmyra and the sacred grove.  It was very beautiful there.  Here is the old Smith farmhouse.

 ...and barn.

 The sacred grove was very pretty.  It was also very full of mosquitos.  You could see why Joseph would choose to go into the woods there for peace.

 

 This is my favorite of all of these pictures.

While we were in Palmyra, we went to the Grandin printing press office.  That was a very well done site.  It was restored nicely and we could really see how the printing press worked.  There were also a lot of paintings that we commonly use in the church lessons that the originals were hanging in that building.

 

A few days later, after we went to Hershey Park and visited Aunt Kayti, we went to Kirtland, Ohio.  This is in the Newel K. Whitney store.  They had many antiques in the store so that it looked very much like it would have in the 1830's.

 The Community of Christ owns the temple in Kirtland.  We were able to go on a tour of it.  It is a beautiful building, but is much more like a tabernacle in our church than a current temple.  Most of the temple is original, but we weren't allowed to take pictures inside it.