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The Hill Where the Plates Were Said to Be Buried

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The Hill Where the Plates Were Said to Be Buried

Hill Cumorah is a drumlin, a low ridge of glacial gravel a few miles south of Palmyra in western New York, and it is the place where Latter-day Saints say their founding scripture entered the world. Joseph Smith said that after four annual visits to the hill, he was given on 22 September 1827 a set of gold plates buried within it by the angel Moroni, and that the Book of Mormon was translated from what those plates contained.

A bronze figure of Moroni atop a granite shaft has stood on the summit since 1935, and the hill and its surrounding grounds, owned by the church, are open to visitors without charge, with a small visitors center at the base. As at the Sacred Grove, no ordinance of any kind is performed on the hill itself; it is a historical site rather than a working ceremonial one.

The name carries the one genuinely contested claim attached to any site in this file. The Book of Mormon describes a hill called Cumorah as the scene of a final battle and the depository of a set of ancient records, and whether the New York drumlin is that very hill, or only the place where Moroni later deposited a single record at the end of a much longer geographic story, remains a live and unsettled argument among Latter-day Saints themselves rather than a question outsiders have imposed on the tradition.

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