THE BOX THE PLATES CAME IN

So, where is this box??

My wife and I fell for each other in the box the Salt Lake Temple came in on a magical first date.  I was impressed with my wife's creativity and bubbly personality.

But where is the box the plates came in?  We all know that it was customary to make boxes of stones and put valuables in anciently.  The entire hillside was denuded of trees and dug up from top to bottom from those who did not believe in the Book of Mormon.... Go figure.....

Here are some clues as to what happened to it:

"Three of us took some tools to go to the hill and hunt for more boxes of gold or something, and indeed we found a stone box. We got quite excited about it and dug carefully around it, and by some unseen power it slipped back into the hill. We stood there and looked at it and one of us took a crow-bar and tried to drive it through the lid and hold it, but the bar glanced off and broke off one of the corners of the box. Sometime that box will be found and you will see the corner broken off, and then you will know I have told you the truth" ("The Last Testimony of Martin Harris," by E. Cecil McGavin in The Instructor, October, 1930, Vol. 65, No. 10, pp. 587-589).

Likely, this is from early on in the 1800's.  It sounds as if it was ransacked later and allowed to be destroyed:


In a series of interviews a Mormon writer named Edward Stevenson, who was aquainted with Joseph Smith relates what he was told by an old man living near the Hill Cumorah:

"Questioning him closely he stated that he had seen some good-sized flat stones that had rolled down and lay near the bottom of the hill. This had occurred after the contents of the box had been removed and these stones were doubtless the ones that formerly composed the box. I felt a strong desire to see these ancient relics and told him I would be much pleased to have him inform me where they were to be found. He stated that they had long since been taken away."
(REMINISCENCES OF JOSEPH THE PROPHET, And the Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon by Elder Edward Stevenson, 1893 Salt Lake City, Utah)

In 1875 David Whitmer told a Chicago Times reporter that he had seen the stone ?casket? at Cumorah three times before it was ?washed down to the foot of the hill,?(People of Paradox [New York: Oxford, 2007]

Interesting stuff and then there is this marker placed near the spot where the plates likely were buried to commemorate the spot?:



Now grown up today: