Mormonism Explained
The Golden Plates: What They Were, Who Saw Them, and Where They Went
The most famous artifact in American religion cannot be examined — by Joseph Smith’s own account it went back with an angel in 1829. What remains is stranger than the legend: eleven signed witnesses, a documented trail of hiding places, and arithmetic anyone can check.
The Short Answer
What were the golden plates, and where are they now?
The golden plates — Latter-day Saints usually say “gold plates” — were, per Joseph Smith’s account, an ancient record engraved on thin metal sheets and buried in a stone box in a hillside near Palmyra, New York, by the last prophet of a fallen civilization, Moroni, around AD 421. Smith said Moroni, now an angel, showed him the burial place in 1823, made him wait four years, and delivered the plates on September 22, 1827. For the next two years the plates were hefted, hidden, moved, fought over, and partially translated; in 1829 eleven witnesses signed statements about them, and in 1830 the translation was published as the Book of Mormon. The plates were never displayed publicly — Smith said he gave them back. How the translation was actually produced, stone and hat included, is the seer stones page’s beat; this page is about the object.
Key Takeaways
- The golden plates were the metal record Joseph Smith said he received from the angel Moroni in 1827 and translated as the Book of Mormon.
- Witnesses described gold-colored plates about six to seven by eight inches, bound by three D-rings into a volume four to six inches thick and weighing forty to sixty pounds — far lighter than solid gold, and consistent with an alloy.
- Eleven witnesses signed statements that they saw or handled the plates. Those statements have been printed in every copy of the Book of Mormon since 1830.
- Several witnesses later left the church, some on hostile terms. No documented recantation of the plates testimony exists from any of them.
- Smith said he returned the plates to the angel in 1829, so they cannot be examined. The manuscripts of the translation, by contrast, survive — the printer’s copy complete, the original in part — and are published.
- How the translation itself was produced — the seer stone, the hat, the interpreters — is a separate subject, covered on our seer stones page.
Start Here
Eleven Names
Every printed copy of the Book of Mormon — the Church announced the 200 millionth in December 2023, in some 113 languages — carries two legal-style documents almost nobody reads. They are signed statements: three men swearing an angel showed them a set of gold-colored metal plates, and eight more swearing they held those plates in their hands, turned the leaves, and examined the engravings. Eleven names — printed at the back of the 1830 edition, in the opening pages of a modern one. Several of those men later broke with Joseph Smith — some bitterly, permanently. Not one of them, across decades of opportunity, retracted what he signed.
The plates themselves cannot settle the argument: by Joseph Smith’s own account he returned them to the angel Moroni in 1829, and no artifact exists to test. So the real story of the golden plates is the story of everything around them — where they came from, what forty-some pounds of metal did for two years in and around a farmhouse, who touched them, and what the arithmetic of gold says about the whole affair. The church’s own materials (Gospel Topics; Joseph Smith—History) now lay out the record in detail. Here it is, dated and sourced.
1823–1830: The Object’s Documented Life
Sept 1823
Joseph Smith reports the angel Moroni’s visit and is shown the record’s burial place in the hill later called Cumorah.
1824–26
Three further returns to the same spot on the same date, each ending in instruction rather than the record. The fourth return is the one that ends differently.
Sept 22, 1827
Smith says he receives the plates, with Emma Smith waiting nearby with the wagon.
1827–28
The hiding years: repeated attempts to seize the plates, and a sequence of concealments — a hollow log, the hearth, a barrel of beans for the move to Harmony, Pennsylvania.
Feb 1828
Martin Harris carries a sheet of copied characters to scholars in New York — the Anthon transcript episode.
Jun 1828
Harris loses the first 116 pages of translation; Smith says the plates and interpreters were taken back for a season.
Apr–Jun 1829
The surviving translation is dictated, mostly with the plates wrapped nearby rather than open on the table.
Jun 1829
The Three Witnesses and then the Eight Witnesses sign their statements.
1829
With the translation finished, Smith says he returns the plates to the angel. Nothing since has been available to examine.
1830
The Book of Mormon is published in Palmyra, with both witness testimonies printed inside — as they have been in every edition since.
The Object Itself
What Were the Golden Plates?
Answer first, straight from the witness descriptions: a stack of thin, gold-colored metal leaves, each roughly six to seven inches wide by eight inches long and about as thin as sheet tin, engraved on both sides with small characters, bound along one edge by three D-shaped rings into a volume four to six inches thick. A portion was “sealed” — bound so the leaves could not be turned, and never translated; the accounts put it at between half and two-thirds of the stack, David Whitmer saying “about the half of the book” and Orson Pratt, who knew the witnesses but never saw the plates himself, saying two-thirds. Those who lifted the bundle put its weight between forty and sixty pounds.
Emma Smith, who dusted around them for months but never saw them uncovered, left the most tactile description on record — moving them on the table as they lay wrapped in cloth.
“I once felt of the plates, as they thus lay on the table, tracing their outline and shape. They seemed to be pliable like thick paper, and would rustle with a metallic sound when the edges were moved by the thumb, as one does sometimes thumb the edges of a book.”
Emma Smith, “Last Testimony of Sister Emma,” Saints’ Herald, October 1, 1879 — she never saw them uncovered; she moved them, wrapped, to dust the table
The Plates, as Described
A composite of the witness accounts — an original drawing, not a photograph or a replica.
Scroll the drawing sideways to see the full stack — every label in it is repeated below.
- Leaf size
- About 6–7 in. wide × 8 in. long
- Stack
- Bound 4–6 in. thick
- Binding
- Three D-shaped rings through one edge
- Surface
- Engraved on both sides, thin as sheet tin
- Sealed
- Half to two-thirds of the stack; never translated
- Weight
- 40–60 lb, per those who lifted it
The Place and the Date
Where Did Joseph Smith Find the Golden Plates?
In a hill near his family’s farm, between Palmyra and Manchester in western New York — the rise later called the Hill Cumorah. Smith’s 1838 history says the angel Moroni first appeared to him on the night of September 21, 1823, named the record, and showed him in vision where it lay: under a rounded stone on the hill’s west side, inside a box formed of stones set in cement, along with other objects including the two-stone interpreters that would be used in the translation.
He was not allowed to take it. This is the detail the folk-hero version skips: he was required to return to the same spot on the same date for four consecutive years, receiving instruction each time and leaving empty-handed, until September 22, 1827, when — with Emma waiting nearby — he said the record was finally placed in his hands. Believing readers see a prophet under four years of preparation. Skeptical readers see the shape of regional treasure lore, in which a guarded deposit, an annual return and a set of conditions are stock elements. Both readings work from the same calendar, which is itself worth noticing: the disputed part is the meaning, not the dates.
Custody
Two Years of Hiding Places
Word got out before Smith got home. His history and family accounts describe repeated attempts to steal the plates during 1827–28 — and a documented itinerary of hiding places that reads like a heist film run in reverse: a hollowed birch log in the woods; under the hearthstone of the Smith home; in a barrel of beans for the move to Harmony, Pennsylvania. Whatever a reader concludes about what was in the cloth, the family’s behavior is consistent: they treated the bundle as something worth losing sleep over for two years.
Two years of custody
Documented One Hiding Place at a Time
Sept 1827
A hollowed birch log
Cut open and re-covered with bark, about three miles from the house, on the day he brought them down the hill.
1827
Under the hearthstone
Part of the hearth lifted, the box buried beneath it, the stones reset over the top.
1827
The cooper’s shop loft
Hidden in flax overhead, while the emptied box stayed buried under the shop floor as a decoy. A mob tore up the floor and smashed it.
Dec 1827
A barrel of beans
Packed for the wagon to Harmony, Pennsylvania.
1829
Returned to Moroni
The translation finished — and the end of the physical trail.
Sequence per Lucy Mack Smith’s Biographical Sketches (1853), as narrated in the Church’s own history, Saints, Volume 1. Joseph Smith—History 1 records the attempts to seize the plates but not the hiding places; the return in 1829 is his own, at verse 60.
Two episodes from those years matter beyond the chase. In February 1828, Martin Harris carried a sheet of characters copied from the plates to scholars in New York, among them Samuel Mitchill and Charles Anthon of Columbia — the “Anthon transcript” episode, which both sides claim. Harris reported that Anthon signed a statement authenticating the characters and then tore it up on learning how the plates had been obtained, and that Anthon, told part of the record was sealed, answered “I cannot read a sealed book”; Anthon later wrote letters denying the account, in versions that do not entirely agree with each other. Latter-day Saints have read the exchange as fulfilling Isaiah 29:11. Then, that summer, Harris borrowed the first 116 translated pages to show his family and lost them. Smith said the plates and the interpreters were taken back for a season as a rebuke. The plates came back that fall; the accounts disagree about the interpreters, and from that point most descriptions of the dictation have the brown seer stone in his hand instead. The surviving translation was dictated in the spring of 1829, mostly with the plates wrapped on the table rather than open before him — the method has its own page.
The Evidentiary Heart
Who Saw the Plates? The Eleven Witnesses
This is the part of the record that does the most work, so it should be stated precisely. In June 1829, two groups signed formal statements that have been printed in every edition of the Book of Mormon since 1830. The Three Witnesses — Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer and Martin Harris — testified to a visionary experience: an angel descended, laid the plates before their eyes, and a voice declared the translation correct. Their statement is plain about what that came to: “we beheld and saw the plates, and the engravings thereon.” Days later the Eight Witnesses — Christian, Jacob, Peter Jr. and John Whitmer; Hiram Page; and Joseph’s father and brothers Hyrum and Samuel — testified to something deliberately more ordinary: no angel, daylight, hands. “As many of the leaves as the said Smith has translated we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon.”
Then comes the stress test. Within a decade, all three of the Three Witnesses and several of the Eight were out of the church — excommunicated or estranged, and some of them denouncing Joseph Smith personally and in print. That is the condition under which a fabricated story usually comes apart, because the people with the most reason to expose it now have nothing left to lose. Instead, they went on affirming it. David Whitmer spent fifty years outside the church, and near the end of his life published a pamphlet — critical of the church — that opened by reaffirming the testimony.
“I will say once more to all mankind, that I have never at any time denied that testimony or any part thereof.”
David Whitmer, 1887 · fifty years after leaving the church · published in a pamphlet criticizing it
The Eleven, and What Each Group Swore To
Both statements have been printed in every copy of the Book of Mormon since 1830.
The Three Witnesses
An angel showed them the plates
They testified that an angel came down, laid the plates before their eyes, and that a voice declared the translation correct.
- Oliver Cowdery
- David Whitmer
- Martin Harris
All three later left the church. Cowdery and Harris returned.
The Eight Witnesses
They handled the plates themselves
No angel and no vision: Joseph Smith showed them the plates, they handled the translated leaves, and they saw the engravings.
- Christian Whitmer
- Jacob Whitmer
- Peter Whitmer Jun.
- John Whitmer
- Hiram Page
- Joseph Smith Sen.
- Hyrum Smith
- Samuel H. Smith
Four Whitmers and three of Joseph Smith’s own family.
0
Documented recantations of the plates testimony among the eleven. Several repudiated Joseph Smith; no statement survives in which any of them withdrew what he signed about the plates.
“As many of the leaves as the said Smith has translated we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of ancient work, and of curious workmanship… for we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith has got the plates of which we have spoken.”
Testimony of Eight Witnesses, 1829 — printed in every copy of the Book of Mormon since 1830
Critics answer with the witnesses’ visionary culture and family ties (four Whitmers, three Smiths); Mormonr’s witnesses Q&A and Scripture Central’s KnoWhys catalog the originals; both readings get their strongest documents here.
Arithmetic Anyone Can Check
Were They Really Gold? Run the Numbers
Take the witnesses’ own dimensions at the top of their range — six inches wide, eight long, six thick — and the block measures 288 cubic inches, or about 4,700 cubic centimeters. Gold has a density of 19.3 grams per cubic centimeter, so a solid block that size would weigh about 91 kilograms: roughly 200 pounds. Take the bottom of the reported thickness instead, four inches, and solid gold still comes to about 135. Even allowing generously for air between stacked leaves, so that metal occupies only half the volume, gold lands near 100 pounds at the six-inch figure. Every witness estimate lands at forty to sixty. The numbers do not reconcile, and everyone involved in this argument knows it.
Two honest readings follow from the same math. Critics use the gap to argue the object was a fabrication in some lighter material — tin, lead, or a weighted wooden dummy — which is exactly what a forty-pound “gold” bundle would be. Defenders point out that the direction of the discrepancy is strange for a hoax: nobody exaggerated toward solid gold, which is what embellishment usually does, and eleven people independently described something that weighed less than the legend they were supposedly selling. They add a specific candidate — tumbaga, the light gold-copper alloy worked in ancient Mesoamerica, which is gold-colored and can be beaten into pliable leaves. The calculation usually cited is Read Putnam’s: eight-karat tumbaga leaves at the witnesses’ dimensions, on the same allowance for air between the leaves, come to roughly 53 pounds — inside the range they reported. That is a hypothesis offered to fit the descriptions, not a finding; no assay is possible.
Fig. 1 — the weight problem · at the witnesses’ stated dimensions
Pounds, for a stack 6 × 8 × 6 inches — the top of the reported range.
Solid gold
~200 lb
no air between leaves
Gold leaves
~100 lb
metal filling half the volume
Tumbaga plates
~53 lb
eight-karat alloy, same half-air allowance — Putnam’s calculation
What the witnesses said
40–60 lb
estimates from those who lifted the covered bundle
The gap the whole argument turns on: no witness estimate comes near solid gold
The honest summary is short. “Gold plates” is a traditional name, not an assay. The descriptions fit a gold-colored alloy better than they fit pure gold. And no measurement will ever settle it, because the object left the record in 1829. What the numbers do settle is smaller and stranger than either side usually wants: eleven people independently described something no heavier than a bag of cement, when the legend they were allegedly inventing would have paid better in solid gold.
The Question Everyone Asks
Where Are the Golden Plates Now?
Answer first: nowhere you can visit. Joseph Smith’s history states that when the translation was finished in 1829, he returned the plates to the angel, who “has them in his charge until this day” (Joseph Smith—History 1:60). That has been the answer for nearly two centuries. There is no vault, no museum case, no secret archive; the Church has never claimed physical possession of the plates, and does not claim it now.
What can be examined is everything else. The printer’s manuscript of the translation survives complete, and about 28 percent of the original dictation manuscript survives — the rest was lost to water damage in the Nauvoo House cornerstone. Both have been published by the Joseph Smith Papers. The witnesses’ statements survive, along with decades of their subsequent interviews and letters. The production trail of the 1830 printing survives. For believers, the plates’ departure is close to the point — the faith was built to rest on witnesses and on the book, not on an artifact under glass. For skeptics, an unexaminable artifact is indistinguishable from no artifact at all. Both of those are reasonable responses to the same situation, and this page’s job was to hand you everything the record actually holds.
Continue the Record
Joseph Smith’s Seer Stones: The Hat, the Plates & the Truth
The sibling hub: how the translation was actually produced — the interpreters, the brown stone, and the hat the paintings never showed.
Emma Smith: Polygamy, the Church, and What She Knew
She moved the wrapped plates to dust the table, and scribed the earliest dictation. The rest of her story.
Mormonism 101: The Complete Beginner’s Guide
Start here if the terms on this page — Moroni, the interpreters, the Restoration — are new.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the Mormon golden plates?
The golden plates were the ancient metal record Joseph Smith said he received from the angel Moroni in 1827 near Palmyra, New York, and translated as the Book of Mormon. Witnesses described thin gold-colored leaves about six to seven inches wide by eight inches long, bound by three rings into a volume four to six inches thick and weighing 40 to 60 pounds, with a sealed portion that was never translated. Smith said he returned them to the angel in 1829.
Where did Joseph Smith find the golden plates?
In a hill near Palmyra and Manchester, New York — later called the Hill Cumorah — buried in a stone box under a rounded stone on the hill’s west side. Smith said the angel Moroni showed him the spot in September 1823 but required him to return to it annually for four years; he said he received the plates on September 22, 1827.
Where are the golden plates now?
According to Joseph Smith’s 1838 history, he returned the plates to the angel Moroni when the translation was complete in 1829. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has never claimed physical possession, and the plates have never been available for examination. The manuscripts of the translation, by contrast, survive and are published — the printer’s manuscript complete, and about 28 percent of the original dictation manuscript.
Who saw the golden plates?
Eleven witnesses signed statements printed in every copy of the Book of Mormon: the Three Witnesses — Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer and Martin Harris — who said an angel showed them the plates, and the Eight Witnesses — four Whitmers, three members of Joseph Smith’s family, and Hiram Page — who said they handled and examined them with no angel present. Emma Smith and others also described handling the covered plates.
Did any of the witnesses deny their testimony?
No witness is documented as recanting. All three of the Three Witnesses and several of the Eight later left or were excommunicated from the church, several on bitter terms, and each reaffirmed his published testimony — David Whitmer most famously in an 1887 pamphlet written while still outside the church. Critics respond by pointing to the witnesses’ visionary religious culture and their family ties rather than alleging a recantation.
Were the golden plates made of real gold?
Unknown, and untestable. Solid gold at the described dimensions would weigh roughly 200 pounds, while witnesses consistently estimated 40 to 60. Defenders note that the descriptions fit a light gold-copper alloy such as Mesoamerican tumbaga; critics read the same gap as evidence of a lighter fabricated prop. “Gold plates” is a traditional name, not an assay.
How heavy were the golden plates?
Witnesses who lifted the covered plates — including Martin Harris and members of the Smith family — estimated 40 to 60 pounds. That is well below solid gold at the stated dimensions, which is why both critics and defenders treat the weight as one of the most analytically useful details in the record.
What was the sealed portion of the plates?
Witnesses said part of the stack — estimates run from about half to two-thirds, David Whitmer giving the lower figure and Orson Pratt the higher — was bound so its leaves could not be turned. Joseph Smith said he was forbidden to translate it, and the Book of Mormon itself describes a sealed record reserved for a future time. It was returned with the rest of the plates in 1829.
What was the Anthon transcript?
In February 1828, Martin Harris carried a sheet of characters copied from the plates to scholars in New York, among them Samuel Mitchill and Charles Anthon of Columbia. Harris reported that Anthon signed a statement authenticating the characters and tore it up on learning how the plates had been obtained; Anthon later wrote letters denying it, in versions that do not fully agree with one another. Latter-day Saints read the episode as fulfilling Isaiah 29:11; critics read it as a misunderstood consultation. Transcriptions of Book of Mormon characters from Joseph Smith’s lifetime survive, though scholars question whether any of them is the sheet Harris carried.
Did Joseph Smith translate the plates by reading them directly?
By the eyewitness accounts, mostly not. For most of the work the plates lay wrapped nearby while Smith dictated using a seer stone in a hat, or the two-stone interpreters he said were found with the plates. Smith himself only ever said the translation came “by the gift and power of God.” Our seer stones page covers the method in full.
Sources
- Joseph Smith—History 1 (Pearl of Great Price) — the 1838 account: Moroni, the hill, the annual visits, the receipt, the return. churchofjesuschrist.org
- “Book of Mormon Translation.” Gospel Topics Essays. churchofjesuschrist.org
- Testimony of Three Witnesses; Testimony of Eight Witnesses — printed in every Book of Mormon edition since 1830.
- Saints, Vol. 1: The Standard of Truth (2018), chs. 2–6 — the plates narrative in the church’s own history.
- Joseph Smith Papers — “Gold Plates” topic page; witness biographies; the “Caractors” document. josephsmithpapers.org
- Scripture Central — KnoWhys on the plates’ weight and material (tumbaga hypothesis; Putnam 1966) and on the witnesses. scripturecentral.org
- Mormonr — gold plates and witnesses primary-source Q&As. mormonr.org
- David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, MO, 1887).
- Lucy Mack Smith, Biographical Sketches (1853) — the hiding-places narrative.
- Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005), chs. 2–4.