Mormons in New York City

The next meeting of the New York New York Stake History Committee will be held on October 12th at 6:30pm at Glen Nelson’s home, 457 West 57th St #601. As always, we request that those attending bring a dish of food. We will make the agenda for the meeting available ahead of time, as usual.

Our next walking tour of LDS Church history sites in lower manhattan is coming soon. The tour is scheduled for Saturday, September 27th at 10am, and will cover historical sites in lower Manhattan that will tell the early history of the Church in New York City. The tour begins at City Hall Park, and will conclude at Old Slip. Meet at 10 AM at the fountain in City Hall Park. Tour takes approx. 1.5 hrs and covers just over 1 mile.

Further information about the tour can be found in the walking tour page on our website. The page includes a link to the brochure for the tour, and contact information for how to schedule a tour if you can’t make one of the scheduled tours.

While collecting articles that mention New York City from the Times and Seasons, I came across an 1840 letter from George J. Adams that provides some great insight into the beginnings of a branch in Brooklyn that year. Adams recounts founding a branch of 19 in Brooklyn after hearing a sermon by Heber C. Kimball in February of that year, joining the Church eight days later and being ordained an Elder eight days after that. Read the rest of this entry »

This past sunday evening New York Stake member and friend of our history committee, Mark Holden, showed many of the interesting items from his personal collection at a fireside held in the 87th street building. The collection was really quite fascinating, as were Mark’s stories about the items and how he found them. The fireside drew more than 50 people and even included a few items of interest to those studying the Mormon presence in New York.

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This week I added to the wiki a list of items in the LDS Church archives that were categorized under “New York City New York History” in the computer catalog. The list includes some tempting items, including several interviews and diaries that I don’t think we knew existed, and yet another indication of LDS branches operating in New York City after the Easter States Mission was closed.

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This past weekend as I added newspaper articles to the website, I came across a fascinating story about the divorce of the Glovers in 1892. The initial article mentioned that the couple attended the Mormon Church that met at Rockaway Avenue and Fulton Street. Here, I thought, was more evidence of LDS Church meetings before the Eastern States Mission was reopened in 1893.

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This week I pulled source articles from the New York Times database and found an interesting difficulty that the LDS Church’s immigration agents faced in 1890. US Immigration authorities threatened to deny entrance to Mormon immigrants that year, as a series of 6 articles in the New York Times demonstrates.

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4 videos about the Church in Harlem that were added to YouTube about a month ago. The videos were done by a non-Mormon Brazilian graduate student at Columbia University (I assume in Journalism)

While perhaps not as researched as many on this list would like, they do include a brief overview of the history of blacks and the priesthood, and include appearances by both Richard and Claudia Bushman.

So I’ve embedded them in the NYC LDS History website:

http://www.nycldshistory.com/nycldshist/index.php?title=Harlem

Please feel free to pass this on to whomever you think would be interested.

The next meeting of the New York New York Stake History Committee will be held on June 1st at 6:30pm at Glen Nelson’s home, 457 West 57th St #601.

As always, we request that those attending bring a dish of food.

We will make the agenda for the meeting available ahead of time, as usual.