Herbert S. Salisbury recorded a second occasion on which Katharine Smith Salisbury personally handled the plates — distinct from the day Joseph first brought them home. According to Katharine’s account to her grandson, while she was cleaning in the Smith family home, she encountered the wrapped plates lying on the table in the room Joseph used as his study:
[Katharine] told me that while dusting up the room where the Prophet had his study she saw a package on the table containing the gold plates on which was engraved the story of the Book of Mormon. She said she hefted those plates and found them very heavy like gold and also rippled her fingers up the edge of the plates and felt that they were separate metal plates and heard the tinkle of sound that they made.
In a parallel passage published the same year, Mary Salisbury Hancock — Katharine’s granddaughter — reported that on the day Joseph brought the plates home he actually handed them to Katharine: see Mary Salisbury Hancock, “The Three Sisters of Joseph Smith,” Saints’ Herald 101 (25 January 1954): 12.