Wilford Woodruff moved from his hometown of Farmington, Connecticut to Oswego County, New York in 1832. He had managed mills for several employers and he and his brothers, Azmon and Thompson, decided to buy their own mill on Grindstone Creek, near Lake Ontario. It was there Wilford first heard the Elders preach and where he was baptized on December 31, 1833.
The Woodruff family asked me if I could help them locate the original property and determine if there were any remnants of the old mill, the homestead, or even the schoolhouse where Zerah Pulsipher and Elijah Cheney introduced the restored gospel to Wilford and Azmon Woodruff.
The old buildings burned and the property had remained undeveloped for decades. But serendipitously the current owners of the Woodruff property just happened to be building a house. In the process of digging their foundation, they uncovered original masonry! They also found large metal parts (of the mill? or farm equipment?), pieces of pottery, and even what may have been a small medicine bottle. They had no idea they were uncovering important pieces of Woodruff family history.
An excerpt from my book gives the historical context of the significance of this property in Wilford Woodruff's life:
Wilford described the events of December 1833 in these
words: “Zerah
Pulsipher ... told me that he was inspired of the Lord. He was threshing grain in his barn when the
voice of the Lord came to him and told him to arise and go to the north; the
Lord had business for him there. He
called upon Brother [Elijah] Cheney, his neighbor and a member of the
Church. They traveled sixty miles on
foot ... in deep snow, and the first place they felt impressed to call upon
was the house of my brother and myself.
They went into the house and talked with my brother’s wife, and they
told her who they were and what their business was. ... When they told her their
principles, she said her husband and her brother-in-law both were men who
believed those principles, and they had prayed for them for years. They appointed a meeting in the schoolhouse
upon our farm.”[i]
When Wilford returned home that evening,
his sister-in-law Elizabeth told him about the meeting and, without stopping to
eat dinner, he headed for the schoolhouse to find his brother Azmon. On his way Wilford prayed that the Lord would
bless him with the Spirit, so “if these men were the servants of God [he] might
know it, and that [his] heart might be prepared to receive the divine message they
had to deliver.”[ii] He arrived in time to hear Elder Pulsipher’s prayer and wrote
that he simply knelt down and asked the Lord for
what he wanted. Elder Pulsipher's manner of prayer and
the power which accompanied it impressed Wilford greatly. Wilford said the Spirit of the Lord rested upon him and
bore witness that Zerah Pulsipher was a servant of God.[iii]
After singing, Elder Pulsipher preached for an hour and a
half of the divine authenticity of the Book of Mormon and of the mission of the
Prophet Joseph Smith. Elder Cheney then
added his witness of the truth of the restored gospel. At the conclusion of their testimonies, when
the two Elders asked if anyone in the congregation wanted to speak, both
Wilford and Azmon stood to share with their friends and neighbors their
conviction that Elders Pulsipher and Cheney were preaching the pure gospel of
Jesus Christ.
Following the meeting the Woodruffs invited the Elders to stay at
their home, and Wilford sat up all night reading the Book of Mormon. In his journal Wilford wrote that as he read, he
“felt much of the Spirit of God bearing witness to the Book of Mormon.” He believed it was "light out of darkness and
truth out of the ground.”[iv] In the morning he told Elder Pulsipher that
he wanted to be baptized because he had a testimony for himself that the
principles were true. Wilford's prayers had
been answered. As God promised, Wilford had been blessed with the guidance of the Spirit. He had found the Church of Christ with the same principles taught through the ages by God's prophets, and the priesthood power manifested in the
gifts of the Spirit.
Understanding the need to not just be baptized in the proper
manner, but to be “born of the water and of the Spirit” by those who had the authority to act in God's name, Wilford and his brother Azmon were
baptized and confirmed members of the restored Church of Jesus Christ on December 31, 1833.
Of his baptism Wilford wrote: "The snow was about three feet deep, the
day was cold, and the water was mixed with ice and snow, yet I did not feel the
cold."[v]