Reseeding Hill Cumorah Here’s a did-you-know fact: Nearly 100 years ago, missionaries planted 70,000 tree saplings on the Hill Cumorah. All that work was done under the direction of my great-grandfather’s brother, Willard Bean, the Fighting Preacher, who helped the church acquire the Hill Cumorah site. He and his wife Rebecca served as missionaries in Palmyra and Manchester for 24 years. Over the succeeding century, thousands of those trees were cleared to make way for an ever-expanding Hill Cumorah Pageant. Now that leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have closed the curtains on the pageant, they want the full forest to return to a site heralded as the place where the Angel Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith and permitted him to retrieve buried golden plates he would translate as the Book of Mormon. Saturday, 50 volunteer missionaries returned to reseed the hill. “We’re now using missionaries again to come and scatter thousands of tree seeds on the hill, and those will grow up into the next generation of hardwood, old growth forest on the Hill Cumorah,” Church Historic Sites Manager Ben Pykles said in a news release. But there’s a new twist on a recent batch of stories about two years’ worth of renovation and restoration work going on at the hill. TheTravel.com just listed Palmyra, New York — including the Hill Cumorah site in neighboring Manchester — one of the 10 upstate New York towns that are even more beautiful in the winter. “Located in New York’s Wayne County, Palmyra Town is a small, lovely town that’s charmingly green and gorgeous,” the travel story said. “The town’s environs display a landscape with many hills and mountains beautifully interspersed with lush valleys, gifting it a look that’s dramatic and alluring, and easy to fall in love with. One little fun fact is that Palmyra is the birthplace of the (Latter-day) Saint movement.” Those who do arrive this winter will find that the church has removed about two dozen buildings that had been used for the pageant. “All those buildings have been removed, hundreds of thousands of feet of asphalt parking lot and pavement and trails have been removed and a new network of trails has been established that allows visitors to experience the hill in a reverential contemplative manner, much like Joseph Smith would have experienced it in the 1820s,” Pykles said. I wrote about the church’s overall plans for the Hill Cumorah last year. Bean’s missionaries planted saplings. This time, missionaries planted native tree nuts and seeds. The hope is that the trees will grow stronger and healthier and more like the hill’s old-growth areas. The pageant’s 10-level stage eventually will be replaced by a numerous different kinds of trees — red and white oak, black walnut, shagbark hickory, sugar and red maples, tulip and black cherry. “It will take 25 to 35 years for this to become what it was meant to be,” Pykles said. |