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Show Page 31 10 County, New York, to serve his first mission and "help prepare the 11 way of the Lord for his second coming." While the eyes of the Church were on the western frontier, Orson had been sent eastward. A nucleus of church members met often in Colesville, a village near the Pennsylvania boundary with a little dam and milling enterprise on the Susquehanna. The township had been frequented by Joseph Smith as a young man, and he had friends there - the family of Joseph Knight. The Knights, formerly Universalists, had found Mormon doctrine congenial, but their neighbors violently opposed the little branch. The Knight and Hezekiah Stowell families had seen their fences destroyed and their stock pillaged, all at the instigation of local ministers. Joseph Smith himself had been tried here before a parade of drunken witnesses in an all-night session the previous June; the charge of "disorderliness" had been dropped. But the townspeople still showed a grim face to "Mormonites," bestirred by the fulminations of their pastors. Here Orson Pratt commenced, it may be imagined somewhat hesitantly, to open his mouth in public meetings. Two churches stood withint the township, St. Luke's Episcopal and the Nineveh Presbyterian, under the pastorship of John Sherer, who had brought the complaint against the Prophet that summer. It is safe to conclude that these pulpits were not opened to the young Mormon, but it was nevertheless common for the missionaries to find audiences of the covertly curious in schoolhouses. These modern Nineveh-ites were no exception, and Orson found a few hearers. Out of Colesville, the center of a virulent opposition which had grown into legal harassment of the Mormons, came the nucleus of the new Zion. The entire branch moved from Colesville, as a body, to Thompson, Ohio, and thence to the site of the New Jerusalem in Missouri within six months of Orson's mission among them. Fifty years later, the site of Colesville |