In the first week of September 2015, Greg Pavone and I unearthed Miner’s Hill cave in Manchester New York. This cave may have originally been dug by Joseph Smith Jr., founder of Mormonism in the 1820s, and may have been one of the locations of the Book of Mormon’s translation and/or manuscript preparation.
Having successfully located the cave and cleared its entrance, the question of “what’s next?” became more pertinent. We did notify representatives of the LDS Church’s history department. They were interested and excited about our findings, but they have established a high standard of evidence that a site must meet before they invest in its exploration or preservation. Given that most of the information about Miner’s Hill comes from either decades-too-late newspapers or other less-than-credible second- and third-hand accounts, and that the sources largely disagree on the function or purpose of the cave, the Church has determined that the cave hold no relation or relevance to the Restoration, and that the cave was—if anything—simply the setting of a treasure dig.
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