Emily's neck of the woods (aka Vermont)

I spent last week in Boston at a geography conference. One day we took a road trip to Vermont and New Hampshire. We stopped to take photos of the Boston (actually in Belmont) Temple

We saw many covered bridges and white congregational churches along the way. Our primary destination was the Joseph Smith birthplace in Sharon Vermont. The granite pillar is one huge piece. It is 38 1/2 feet tall--one foot for each year of the prophet's life. The home where Joseph Smith was born is under the white birch at the far left of the photo. The Smith family lived here from 1805-1807

The Smith family lived in several homes in Vermont and across the Connecticut River in New Hampshire. A Congregational church (photo) sits on the village green of Norwich. The last place the Smith family lived before moving to Palmyra.

The dairy farm (photo) is in Turnbridge. This is where the Smith (settled here in 1791) and Mack families (settled here in 1799) lived when Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack met and married. Later the Smith family lived here from 1807-1808.

From 1811-1814. the Smith family lived in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, which is just a few miles south of Hanover, New Hampshire the site of Dartmouth University (photo). One of the Doctors at the Dartmouth Medical school was the only doctor in the US at the time who was wiling to experiment with leg operations. He was sable to save the leg of young Joseph.

The two covered bridges are in South Turnbridge and North Turnbridge. Mack relatives ran a saw mill along the stream.

The last photo is a home a few miles north of Norwich and is the probable site of the home where the Smith family lived just before giving up on farming in New England and moving to greener pastures in New York. The left because of crop failure caused during the "year without summer" which was caused by climate changes and a very cold summer brought on by the eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia. Had the volcano not sent so much climate changing ash into the atmosphere the Smith family might never have been compelled to give up farming in Vermont.