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Show Page 21 sectarian uproar Orson had left behind in New York. Among the notable preachers of the vicinity was the Reverend Sidney Rigdon, a disciple of Alexander Campbell's restorationist theology, who had established thriving congregations in nearby Kirtland and Mentor. The Campbellites advocated primitivism, a return to the simplicity of New Testament conventions, which readily caught hold among the hard-headed settlers of 33 the Western Reserve. Rigdon's advocacy of a return to scriptural patterns may have touched the imagination of the boy Orson, whether or not Rigdon's name was personally known to him. The restorationist atmosphere certainly inspired his brother Parley, for in August of 1830, this exile' from the "civilized world" became one of Rigdon's official envoys 34 to that world. Orson, though familiar with the "great agitation" Rigdon and others were causing in the neighborhood that spring of 1828, had more territory to see and more searching in mind before he could reach any spiritual resolution for himself. Dissatisfied, almost on adolescent impulse, Orson broke for the East. What he had found in Ohio was apparently no more promising to him than what he had left behind, and so began a pilgrimage to his ancestral state of Connecticut. Possibly by way of Kirtland, the town which was to figure so largely in his future, he stopped to labor for a farmer named Benjamin Norris in Perry Township, a few miles east of Painesville, Ohio, and thence six hundred miles to Connecticut. By springtime, 1829, Orson had completed a great circle, reaching New York by steamer and spending the winter on Long Island with Anson. Canaan Township received him again, and he settled back into his pattern of farming for other men. His seventeenth year was spent in hard work and contemplation; hiring himself out as a hand first for an established family named Haight and then for Mr. Joshua Lord, he managed to make enough to board at a |
