The towns of central vermont were the immediate hearth of Joseph Smith's Mormon church. The Smiths of Topsfield were predisposed to witchcraft beliefs and metallurgical dreams; the Macks of Lyme lived in a religious milieu of visions, healing miracles, and sectarian perfectionism. The marriage in 1796 of Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack in Tunbridge, Vermont, brought both streams of familial culture into a single household. So, too, the northern frontier attracted many other people from the dissenting, sectarian communities of older New England, people at odds with orthodoxy, people sharing a deep-rooted affinity for works of wonder. And here this prepared people encountered the full force of the late-eighteenth-century reformulations of the hermetic tradition.