Review: Mark L. Staker and Donald L. Enders. Joseph and Lucy Smith’s Tunbridge Farm: An Archaeology and Landscape Study. Independence, MO: John Whitmer Books, 2021.

Authors

Mark P. Leone

Keywords

Joseph Smith, Latter-day Saint, archaeology

Abstract

Joseph and Lucy Smith’s Tunbridge Farm by Mark L. Staker and Donald L. Enders is a chapter in a Latter-day Saint Book of Hours (a meditative guide to be read throughout the day filled with prayers meant to focus on guidance from God). Staker and Enders’s volume uses archaeology and landscape to ponder a moment in God’s intervention in the course of human life. The authors are ordinary, honest archaeologists digging at a founding and farming site in the lives of Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith. The Smiths were the parents of ten children, including Joseph Smith Jr., who founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This early hour of a new church and its material culture—the landscape, flowing water, hills, groves, cherry trees and apple trees—is a Genesis and this brief, well-written meditation allows readers to walk, touch, and witness the material culture of that important hour in the church’s beginnings.

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

Leone, Mark P. (2023) "Review: Mark L. Staker and Donald L. Enders. Joseph and Lucy Smith’s Tunbridge Farm: An Archaeology and Landscape Study. Independence, MO: John Whitmer Books, 2021.," Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 10: No. 1, Article 12.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol10/iss1/12