Hill Cumorah

Hill Cumorah is a drumlin, a low ridge of glacial gravel a few miles south of Palmyra in western New York, and it is the place where Latter-day Saints say their founding scripture entered the world. Joseph Smith said that after four annual visits to the hill, he was given on 22 September 1827 a set of gold plates buried within it by the angel Moroni, and that the Book of Mormon was translated from what those plates contained.

A bronze figure of Moroni atop a granite shaft has stood on the summit since 1935, and the hill and its surrounding grounds, owned by the church, are open to visitors without charge, with a small visitors center at the base. As at the Sacred Grove, no ordinance of any kind is performed on the hill itself; it is a historical site rather than a working ceremonial one.

The name carries the one genuinely contested claim attached to any site in this file. The Book of Mormon describes a hill called Cumorah as the scene of a final battle and the depository of a set of ancient records, and whether the New York drumlin is that very hill, or only the place where Moroni later deposited a single record at the end of a much longer geographic story, remains a live and unsettled argument among Latter-day Saints themselves rather than a question outsiders have imposed on the tradition.

The church acquired Hill Cumorah in 1928 together with the land around it, and dedicated the Moroni monument on its summit in 1935. Two years later the hill began hosting the Hill Cumorah Pageant, an outdoor dramatization of scenes from the Book of Mormon staged on a terraced set built into the hillside itself, which grew over the following decades into one of the largest outdoor theatrical productions anywhere in the United States, drawing casts of several hundred volunteers and audiences numbering in the tens of thousands across a single week each July.

The church announced in 2018 that the pageant would end, part of a broader decision to discontinue its largest historical pageants altogether, and the 2019 season proved to be its last after more than eighty years of continuous production.

The identification of the hill has its own long history. Latter-day Saints in New York were using the name Cumorah for this drumlin from the 1830s onward, and the equation between the local hill and the scripture's Cumorah went essentially unquestioned for a century. From the mid twentieth century, the rise of Mesoamerican settings proposed for the Book of Mormon's narrative produced a rival position, held by a number of Latter-day Saint scholars, that the book's own Cumorah lay far to the south, making the New York hill a second and separate place that happens to share the name.