Ohio served the early Latter-day Saints first as a place of relative refuge and then as a way station in a larger religious migration. In Kirtland, Joseph Smith’s revelations redirected the movement toward Missouri, while events in the Johnson household tied the state to both the expansion of the faith and conflict surrounding its prophet.

Migration and Settlement

By December 1830, Joseph Smith had become widely regarded in the Palmyra region as a charlatan, and rumors about his gold Bible had helped fuel hostility toward the new religion. A revelation that month instructed him to move his followers to Ohio. The Saints resettled in Kirtland, east of present-day Cleveland, where they found their neighbors relatively hospitable compared with those they had left in New York.

Kirtland as a Way Station

Ohio did not remain the movement’s intended destination. In the summer of 1831, another revelation identified the Missouri frontier as the place appointed for the gathering of the Saints. Joseph directed his followers to assemble in Jackson County and build a New Jerusalem there; they began arriving in northwestern Missouri in increasing numbers through 1838. In the narrative of the movement, Kirtland thus appears as a comparatively welcoming but provisional settlement, its significance shaped by the revelation that sent the Saints onward.

The Johnson Household

Ohio also figures in the account of Joseph Smith’s relationship with Marinda Nancy Johnson. He met her in 1831, after the Saints’ move from Palmyra to Kirtland, when her parents encountered him during a gathering of curious Ohioans. The account says that her parents were impressed by an episode involving her mother’s disabled arm, converted to Mormonism, and invited Smith to meet their children, including Marinda. In the summer of 1831, the Johnson family took Joseph and Emma Smith into their home as boarders. The book reports that Smith purportedly became intimate with Marinda soon afterward, while presenting the alleged relationship as a rumor rather than an established fact. On March 24, 1832, a group of Ohioans, including some Mormons, forced their way into Smith’s room at the Johnson home. The planned operation against him was not carried out after the attending doctor refused to proceed. The incident gives the Ohio setting a second, sharply different association: alongside migration and conversion, it was a site of opposition within and beyond the new religious community.