What is striking about the Sacred Grove is what is not there. This stand of mature woodland near Palmyra, on what was once the Smith family farm in western New York, is the place to which Latter-day Saints trace the beginning of their movement, and yet it holds no shrine, no altar, no building and no marker at any particular tree. No ordinance of any kind is performed there.
Joseph Smith said that in the spring of 1820, as a boy of fourteen unsettled by the competing revivals sweeping the district, he went into the woods near his home to pray, and that there he received a vision of God the Father and Jesus Christ, an event the movement calls the First Vision and treats as the founding account of the restoration it professes.
The church has deliberately kept the grove as woodland rather than building it into a monument: roughly ten acres of preserved forest laced with mown paths, open to anyone, free of charge, every day of the year, with no requirement of membership and no attendant to greet arrivals. Visitors walk in it, sit in it, and pray in it privately if they choose to.
That restraint reflects the tradition's own sense of where sacredness belongs. The ordinances Latter-day Saints consider essential happen inside temples, which are closed to outsiders; the place where the whole movement is said to have begun is a wood that anyone at all may simply walk into.