Liberty Jail
[1] The jail is known in Latter Day Saint movement due to the imprisonment of its founder, Joseph Smith, and some of his associates during the 1838 Mormon War.
Followers of Joseph Smith from Kirtland, Ohio, were among the first settlers in the Kansas City metropolitan area, locating about 15 miles (24 km) southeast of the jail site in Independence, Jackson County, Missouri, in 1831.
On May 18, 1838, Smith proclaimed that the land around Wight's ferry was the area to which Adam was banished after leaving the Garden of Eden, and that it would be a gathering spot prior to the Millennium.
General Samuel D. Lucas, leading a militia of 2500 men[3] informed the Mormons at Far West that "they would massacre every man, woman and child" if Smith and several others were not given up.
My brigade shall march for Liberty [township] tomorrow morning at 8 o'clock; and if you execute these men, I will hold you responsible before an earthly tribunal, so help me God.
He outlined the terms of the treaty that General Lucas had previously negotiated which stripped the Mormons of all their arms and property, and required them to leave the state immediately.
[6] On November 9, Colonel Sterling Price and a force of seventy men took Smith and his companions to Richmond, Missouri, for a preliminary hearing[7] before Austin Augustus King.
[12] Smith and the followers were to appeal for a change of venue to Marion County, Missouri, in the northeast corner of the state near the village of Commerce, Illinois.
[13] On April 15, 1839, en route to Boone County, Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, Lyman Wight, Alexander McRae, and Caleb Baldwin were allowed to escape after the sheriff and three of their guards drank whiskey while the fourth guard helped them saddle their horses for the escape.
On March 20, 1839, while incarcerated in Liberty Jail, Joseph Smith dictated a letter to Edward Partridge which was recorded by Caleb Baldwin and Alexander McRae.
Doctrine and Covenants 123 instructs Latter Day Saints to document their difficulties and ask the federal government of the United States for assistance.
["Liberty Jail was a cold, poorly ventilated stone dungeon, with four-foot-thick walls and two small, barred windows.
The upper room had two larger iron barred windows, two feet wide by one foot tall, along with a heavy oak door.
[16] Smith and his companions were imprisoned in Liberty Jail for four and a half months during the coldest part of the Missouri winter.
In 1939, the property was purchased by the LDS Church and in 1963 Joseph Fielding Smith presided over the establishment of a partial reconstruction of the jail wholly within a museum.
A replica of the Liberty Jail was constructed in 2014 at the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah.
[22] The door to the original jail passed into the ownership of Community of Christ after 1888,[23] and was purchased by the LDS Church on March 5, 2024, as part of a larger transfer of historically significant properties and artifacts.
