WESTERN New York was the region that responded
most vigorously to the gospel of Fourierism, proclaimed
by Brisbane, Greeley, Godwin and the Brook Farmers.

Taking Rochester for a center, and a line of fifty
miles for radius, we strike a circle that includes the
birth-places of nearly all the wonderful excitements of
the last forty years. At Palmyra, in Wayne County,
twenty-five miles east of Rochester, Joseph Smith in
1823 was visited by the Angel Moroni, and instructed
about the golden plates from which the book of Mormon
was copied; and there he began the gathering which
grew to be a nation and settled Utah. Batavia, about
thirty miles west of Rochester, was the scene of
Morgan's abduction in 1820; which event started the
great Anti-Masonic excitement, that spread through the
country and changed the politics of the nation. At
Acadia, in Wayne County, adjoining Palmyra, the Fox
family first heard the mysterious noises which were
afterward known as the "Rochester rappings," and
were the beginning of the miracles of modern Spirit-
ualism. The Rochester region has also been famous for
its Revivals, and borders on what Hepworth Dixon has
celebrated as the "Burnt District."

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