In the library

Martin Harris

A prosperous Palmyra farmer who mortgaged his land to pay the printer, lost the money and the farm, left the church in 1837 — and arrived in Salt Lake City thirty-three years later, at eighty-seven, to be baptized again.

Harris is the witness who paid. He was an established farmer near Palmyra, New York, and he mortgaged his home and farm for three thousand dollars to guarantee the printer's bill for the first five thousand copies of the Book of Mormon. He did not get it back.

The testimony

He signed the Testimony of Three Witnesses in June 1829 alongside Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer — the statement describing an angel, the plates, and a voice declaring the translation true.

Out at Kirtland

The Kirtland years went badly for him. He was released from the high council on September 3, 1837, and excommunicated in the last week of December that year. He stayed in Kirtland for decades after the body of the church had gone west — the man who had financed the book, living beside the temple, outside the church that built it.

Utah, at eighty-seven

In 1870, accompanied by Edward Stevenson, Harris travelled by rail and arrived in Salt Lake City on August 30. He was eighty-seven years old. On September 17 he was rebaptized.

He lived out his last years in northern Utah — Harrisville, then Smithfield, then Clarkston in 1874 — and died at Clarkston on July 10, 1875, having borne testimony of the Book of Mormon once more before the end.

David Whitmer, who never returned to the church himself and had no reason to flatter the memory, wrote that neither Cowdery nor Harris ever denied their testimony, and that both died reaffirming it. That sentence appears in a pamphlet arguing against the church, which is what makes it worth quoting.