December 1977 Ensign Article

A great article sharing some of the history of the Hill Cumorah Pageant

Palmyra: A Look at 40 Years of Pageant

By Gerald Argetsinger

Dr. Jack Paul Sederholm has been called by the First Presidency to direct the Hill Cumorah Pageant, “America’s Witness for Christ.” Brother Sederholm has assisted Dr. Harold I. Hansen for the last twelve of Hansen’s forty years as pageant director.
The new director will continue to serve as chairman of the Communication Arts Department at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Speech and Dramatic Arts from BYU, and in 1976 directed the “This Land of Liberty” pageant for the Potomac and Capitol regions of the Church in Washington, D.C.
With one stage, a hundred actors, and two readers, the Hill Cumorah Pageant in 1937, then only one year old, seemed like a large enough undertaking. Harold I. Hansen was a missionary at the time, “drafted” into directing the production because no one else had his experience in theatre. Now, forty years later, as he retires from his position as pageant director, the show is almost unrecognizable: an incredible twenty-five stages with six hundred actors; a five-track stereo sound system with original music by Crawford Gates; and perhaps the world’s finest outdoor lighting system.
Hundreds of thousands of visitors have seen the pageant during Hansen’s forty years as director. In a recent interview he reminisced about the early years. When he entered the mission field in July 1937 he was told that all the missionaries in his mission were going to take part in a pageant at the Hill Cumorah. They would invite people to come during the proselyting day, and spend their nights in rehearsal.
“When I arrived,” explained Brother Hansen, “they had a script, but no one had addressed themselves to the problems of production.” How would they light the stage? Where would the actors be? How would the audiences hear what was being said?
“The mission president tried to get me interested in the script,” Hansen continued, “because of my background in theatre. But I didn’t know anything about pageantry. Besides, I came on my mission to tract and to do the other things that missionaries do!”
But he was persuaded to direct one short scene. It took him only fifteen minutes to stage it and when the elders in charge of the pageant saw it, they handed him the script and told him thathe was directing the pageant. And he has continued for forty years, as a Church calling, until his recent release.
Brother Hansen notes that the biggest change in the production over the years has been in the attitude of the nonmembers in the area. In 1937 there was some open prejudice against the missionaries and the pageant. Now the attitude toward the Church and the pageant is very positive. Just before the 1977 opening the local Rotary Club gave Brother Hansen an award for outstanding service to the region. President Ezra Taft Benson of the Council of the Twelve accepted the club’s invitation to address them and present the award to Brother Hansen.
Local residents have been kind to the pageant participants, too. Once in the early years of production there was an overabundance of rain—but people still flocked to see the show. The parking lots became mires, and Hansen recalls, “I could actually see the cars sinking into the mud. All I could think about was the terrible mess we would have when it came time for the audience to go home.”
But ten minutes before the end of the pageant, Brother Hansen began to hear the sputter of engines—local farmers were chugging into the parking lots with tractors. They pulled every car out and put them on the highway without accepting a cent in payment. “Kindnesses like that can never be forgotten or repaid,” says Brother Hansen.
Another year, a drought had dried up all the wells and springs that the pageant used to supply water for the water curtain effects. Farmers in the area were even hauling water for their cattle. Yet just before the pageant opened, without any advance notice, the farmers appeared with wagonloads of water and filled the pageant holding tanks. The who went on—with the water curtains.
Harold I. Hansen, a faculty member and former drama department chairman at BYU, looks forward to returning to the pageant as an audience member in coming years to enjoy its growth. For he does believe that the pageant must continue to change. “I can’t imagine anything worse,” he says emphatically, “than if I came back and it looked the same as when I left.”
Though Hansen has accomplished many other things in his long professional life, the Hill Cumorah Pageant has been a major influence on his life and the life of his family. “It has dominated our whole home for all these years. If I hadn’t believed in it, I would never have done it. But I did believe in it, and I kept at it until the Brethren said, ‘You are released.’”
Now there are several pageants in many different places in the Church—but all owe a great debt to Harold Hansen’s exemplary production at the Hill Cumorah.

Boy Scout remembers visit to the 1937 Hill Cumorah Pageant en route to BSA National Jamboree

John O. Anderson’s Hill Cumorah Experience in 1937

In the summer of 1937, the Ogden and Salt Lake Area Councils of the Boy Scouts of America headed off for adventure: the first National Boy Scout Jamboree, to be held in Washington, DC. Brother John O. Anderson, then a 14-year old Scout, recalls “We were gone about 3 weeks, travelling in railroad passenger cars…We went to Chicago, Detroit, Palmyra, Albany, then Boston, New York and Washington, D.C. Going home we went through St. Louis. Anyway, at some point, we ended up in Palmyra and saw the Pageant.” “The Pageant” was the first of the Hill Cumorah Pageants, now one of the largest outdoor pageants in the world. Following are a few of Brother Anderson’s memories of that first one:

“The stage was at the bottom of the Hill and all of the Scouts just sat on the grass on the hillside of Cumorah. I can’t remember whether there was more than one night of the Pageant. Probably there was. I don’t know. I don’t know if all of the Scouts were there at the same time. We sat on the grass on the hillside and we covered the hillside. I still remember the warriors coming out with the trumpets and so forth. I remember colorful warriors off to one side. I don’t know if they blew trumpets or if the soundtrack had trumpets. It seems to me that they came out on the right side as I looked down from the hill. I don’t remember anything else regarding the staging. That was a long time ago.

“Of course we had time to go to the Sacred Grove and the Joseph Smith home and other historic places. I saw a missionary there from Tremonton—Porter Giles. We had read about this, and now we were here. I could just witness his father saying by the fence for Joseph to go home. The thing that was interesting to me, at least, was that a lot of Boy Scouts were running around there. But I especially remember how a bunch of rather noisy Scouts became quiet at the Sacred Grove, without anyone telling us. When we walked into the woods, the entire feeling… the whole situation changed, in terms of the fact that it was just different. The atmosphere changed. People weren’t shouting. It impressed me that everyone was quiet—it was just sacred.

“I was just kind of in awe of the whole thing. I was just 14, and I couldn’t fight, bleed, and die for it [like in the Pageant] and I was no Book of Mormon scholar, but I remember it was a good thing for us to see.”

Brother Anderson went from Palmyra on to the Jamboree, and then back to Tremonton, Utah. As he said, "Obviously, for a person from Tremonton, this was the adventure of a lifetime." During the Pageant and Jamboree, he could not have known that he would live to travel around the world four times, raise his children in Southern Illinois with a two-year stint in Kathmandu, Nepal, pioneer efforts in rebuilding Nauvoo, become a District President, Stake President, Stake Patriarch and serve two missions with his sweetheart, Verna Meyer Anderson. But, looking back, Brother Anderson wonders how much the trip to the Jamboree and the Hill Cumorah contributed to his ability to have the confidence to leave home and live elsewhere. If nothing else, it was a testimony-builder; like so many others who have and will continue to see and participate in the Pageant and visit the Sacred Grove, Brother Anderson was changed and grew in the knowledge of the truthfulness of the Restoration. While the sets and staging have changed over the last 75 years of the performance, many others still leave with that same almost indescribable feeling of awe, but with the sure knowledge that “it was a good thing for us to see.”

Story given to his daughter, Cathy A. Merrill, in September 2011