Myron Davenport Canfield’s manuscript letter to his Uncle Ezra Canfield (living in Ellicotville, Cattarugus Co., New York). Kirtland, Ohio, December 12, 1836.

2 pages, each 7.5 by 12.5 inches.

The second half of the letter is devoted to Kirtland area land prices and speculation, based on the experience of the writer and of his father, probably Samuel Canfield:… instead of finding him in the woods one mile from the Temple where Clarissa and I found him last year I find him on a good road a level farm with good buildings. A nice house well finished and furnished four miles south and east from the temple. He sold his farms in parcels some for ten some for fifteen some for twenty as some for fifty and some for one hundred dollars an acre. After selling the farm . . . he bought another . . . for which he paid nine hundred and fifty dollars and sold it for twenty one hundred the place on which he is now he pays four thousand dollars for and is thought to be the best purchase that has been made in town lately. . . my Father appears to have a sufficiency if not an aboundance of the good things of this world about him . . . To Clarissa I would say I have rambled over the ground where my parents lived when she was with me in Kirtland the land was still there with all its romantic scenery, but little alteration except the erection of a few more huts and a road leading to the village through the gulf that lay in front of their cabin. . . .

Although not mentioned here, one of the purchasers of Samuel Canfield’s land, at $20 per acre, was Joseph Smith. Young Canfield seems to view his own land, further distant in Trumbull County, as primarily an investment. The description of houses and cabins strung out along the road is consistent with other accounts of the frenetic settlement and land speculation in Kirtland at this time. For excellent background to this letter, see Robert Kent Fielding, The Growth of the Mormon Church in Kirtland, Ohio (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Doctoral Dissertation, 1957), Chapter 8.