The Burned Over District Summary

The following is taken from Whitney R. Cross’ book, The Burned Over District pp 146-150
Mormonism has usually been described as a frontier religion. But study of the circumstances of its origins and its continuing appeal in the area which bred it suggests a different view. The church did not rise during the pioneering era of western New York. Its early recruits came from many sects, but invariably from the longest settled neighborhoods of the region. Joseph’s peregrination during the period when he was pregnant with the new religion were always eastward, not westward, from his Manchester home. The first congregations of the church formed at Manchester, Fayette in Seneca County, and Colesville in Broome County. These facts together with the realization of Mormonism’s dependence on current excitements and upon myths and doctrines built by the passage of time into the locality’s very fabric, demonstrate that the Church of the Saints was not a frontier phenomenon in origin.
The far greater gathering of converts from this area came during the region’s riper maturity, after Zion itself had removed to the West. And the recruits enlisted here and elsewhere in the East by returning missionaries far outnumbered those gained in areas of the Middle West where Mormon headquarters chanced from time to time to be located. These propositions could best be supported by the church’s publication of missionary journals, if they exist in the official archives. Even without that evidence, however, they can be adequately documented from scattered references of orthodox sources to Mormon proselytizing and from an analysis of the nativity figures in the Utah Territorial Census of