HBLL's Special Collections

In the summer of 2009, I found myself working at a Shaker Museum in Enfield, New Hampshire, which is the basis of this my blog title. The Shakers were a popular American religious group that had its heyday in the mid-1800s, and I spent four months of my life talking about them to curious tourists last year. One thing I loved at the Shaker museum was opening up the exhibit rooms in the morning. The sun would start to shine through the old Great Stone Dwelling windows and I would just stand in the center of each room, alone with old Shaker furniture, photographs and tools, and the room smelled like New England forest. It was in those moments that I felt closest to these unique people, whose ideals and values were so little understood and so unappreciated.

I haven't felt that feeling in a long time, but as I walked down to the first floor of the BYU Harold B. Lee library for our D&C class Mormon Americana seminar, the smell of old books and artifacts hit me again. As I sat, viewing old illustrated manuscripts, sheets of papyrus, and cuneiform clay blocks, I remembered the medicinal bottles and bishop’s chairs from one of our exhibit rooms. And as I listened to our lecturer, and saw the twinkle in his eye as students asked questions, I remembered the excitement I felt when I met with curious museum visitors and shared Shaker stories with them on humid New England days. It was the first time I had found myself in Special Collections, but I felt like I was at home.

In this environment, I had an important realization that I think will help me as I continue to study the D&C. Over the previous summer, I had immersed myself in the Shaker world. I came to understand them not as two-dimensional characters in the books I was reading, but as real people with emotions and ideas just like us. I know that this sounds strange, but so often when we study history, we don’t realize that the events we read about and the people we see in pictures actually lived. However, seeing original copies of the Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Commandments made me remember that Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, and Hyrum Smith were real men. They were as tangible and as human as anyone walking through the library that day. Their lives were models for ours, and if they could accomplish such great things, we can too.

I walked out of the HBLL with confidence today: confidence in the greatness of these men and in confidence in my own future. If they could make the pages of history, so can we.