Brother Gustav started his own furniture factory in Eastwood, New York in the late 1890s.

Smith and his father boarded in the residence of Isaac Hale in 1825 while employed by a man named Josiah Stowell to locate "a valuable mine of either Gold or Silver and also...coined money and bars or ingots of Gold or Silver" using Smith's presumed skills in the practice of scrying, or using "peep stones", to locate buried treasure by means of divination.

In December 1827, Smith and Emma moved to Harmony from Manchester, New York, to work on the Book of Mormon.

Eventually they bought a small farm and house, where most of the Book of Mormon was produced between April 7 and early June 1829.

Smith also claimed that somewhere between Harmony and Colesville, New York, the apostles Peter, James, and John appeared to him and Cowdery and bestowed on them the Melchizedek priesthood.

Of the many writings Smith claims were divine revelations received by prophecy and now recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants, fifteen were written in Harmony.

The site of the Hale residence, Smith residence (which burned in 1919), and a public cemetery containing the graves of Isaac and Elizabeth Hale and of an infant son born to Joseph and Emma, lie about a mile and a half west of present-day Oakland, Pennsylvania, in Susquehanna County.

[7] Today, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints owns about 288 acres at the location, and operates the Priesthood Restoration Site historic area.

The historic site was developed in 2015 and includes a visitor center, the reconstructed Smith and Hale homes, and several monuments.