An odd little story appeared in the newspapers of the United States in 1901. It was one of those pieces of indeterminate origin with enough human interest that it was clipped from one paper and published in another, over and over and over. I find it in the newspapers of Sylvan Grove, Kansas; St. Albans, Vermont; Danville, Kentucky, Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania; Richmond, Indiana; Red Bank, New Jersey; Chicago, Illinois; and many other places. It even appeared in Safford, Arizona, where surely many, many Mormons read it.

“As you probably know,” said the man from Wayne county, “Mormonism started in the village of Palmyra, about 20 miles east of Rochester. That, and the fact that Admiral Sampson was born there, are the town’s chief claims to fame.

I don’t know who “the man from Wayne county” was; there is nothing in the article to identify him. I can identify “Admiral Sampson,” though – he was William T. Sampson, born in Palmyra in 1840, who graduated from the Naval Academy, served as a young lieutenant during the Civil War, and rose to be commander-in-chief of the navy. So far, so good.

“‘Joe’ Smith, the Mormon prophet, always declared that he dug his Bible out of a hill on a farm now owned by Admiral Sampson’s brother. It is called Mormon hill, and every summer hundreds of Mormons come east to see it. It isn’t very high and the Mormons always climb to the top and kneel down and pray for awhile. When they go away, they take a pebble or a flower or a bunch of grass to remember the place by.

George Sampson was the brother who owned the hill, and “Mormon Hill,” not “Cumorah,” was the name it was known by well into the 20th century. And the picture of Mormon behavior and souvenir collection when visiting the hill sounds entirely plausible.

This habit of theirs set one of the bright boys of the village to thinking. He didn’t have to think long before he decided to form what he called ‘the Mormon Hill Excavation company.’ He was all the officers and all the stockholders, quotes the New York Mail and Express.

This sounds right, too. A newspaper in Rochester. New York, even published the following notice in 1890 concerning the annual meeting of the Mormon Hill Excavation Company. That seems like a lot of work for one “boy” who was “all the officers and all the stockholders,” but this substantiates the existence of such an organization, of whatever size.

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After he’d had some stationery printed with the name of the company on it, he sent some three-line advertisements to the Salt Lake papers, saying that for a quarter apiece he would mail customers a nickel-packed box of relics from Mormon Hill.

Again, the evidence almost-but-not-quite verifies the 1901 claim. This very small box ad – not a three-line text advertisement – did appear in the Deseret News of 1890, without specifying the cost of the “relics.” But these are such minor difficulties that the passage of eleven years could easily account for them.

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Then he went out in front of his house and gathered a lot of pebbles, picked some flowers in his mother’s garden, and sat down to wait for the returns. They came all right. He couldn’t pack the boxes fast enough, and finally he had to take a partner.

Fact? I can’t substantiate it … but neither can I refute it. Why not? It could so easily be true!

“I was the partner,” concluded the man from Wayne county, “and I’d be perfectly satisfied if I could make money as fast now as I did then. I don’t know what has become of the boy who got up the scheme. If he ever comes down this way you people want to grab your pocketbooks and hold on tight.”