This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On 6 April 1830, Joseph Smith organised the Church of Christ, the movement that grew into the Latter Day Saint movement, at the home of Peter Whitmer Sr. in Fayette, New York, with six men present at the founding meeting itself, the formal legal act that gave the new movement a recognised organisational existence. The event grew directly out of the religious ferment of the Second Great Awakening then sweeping rural New York and New England. Smith presented the Book of Mormon, published earlier that same year, as a new volume of scripture recovered by revelation and translation, and as the sign that authority to organise a restored church had been given to him directly rather than inherited from any existing denomination.
This entry records the movement's founding within Christianity as a whole; a separate, denomination scoped set of Latter-day Saints spread events elsewhere in this atlas traces the church's own later migration to Utah and its twentieth century growth across the globe.
What this changed for Christianity's spread was the emergence, from within the same revivalist ferment that produced several other American denominations, of an entirely new tradition claiming continuing scriptural revelation rather than reform of an existing church. Six men in a farmhouse in Fayette began a movement that grew, within two centuries, into a worldwide church numbered in the millions.