The Hill Cumorah is the site of the final battle between the Nephites and Lamanites, in which the Nephites were nearly destroyed around AD 385 (Mormon 6:2–6; 8:2). Mormon wrote to the Lamanite king for leave to gather his people to the land of Cumorah, a land of many waters, rivers, and fountains, and pitched his tents around the hill; by the time 384 years had passed, the remainder of the Nephites had assembled there (Mormon 6:2–5). The Nephites who escaped southward after the battle were hunted down and destroyed (Mormon 8:2). In an earlier era the hill was called Ramah, where the army of Coriantumr camped during the conflict that ended the Jaredites; Moroni identifies Ramah as the same hill where Mormon hid up the records (Ether 15:11).
Mormon, the Nephite military commander and record keeper, hid in the hill all the records entrusted to him, including the large plates of Nephi, but gave his own record (the plates of Mormon) to his son Moroni (Mormon 6:6). Moroni completed his father’s record and added his own writings before concealing and “sealing up” the completed record, known as the gold plates, or plates of Mormon.
The Hill Cumorah has traditionally been linked with the location where Joseph Smith obtained the plates: a drumlin in Manchester, New York near where the Smiths lived in 1823. Joseph Smith referred to it only as “a hill,”1 and locals knew the site as the “Gold Bible Hill.”2 In 1835, Oliver Cowdery made the first explicit on-record association of the Manchester drumlin with the Hill Cumorah of the Book of Mormon.3 In 1844, Lucy Mack Smith retold Joseph’s account and called the drumlin “Cumorah”.4 Church authorities have traditionally upheld this association. The discrepancy between what was reportedly placed in the hill (the large plates of Nephi, cf. Mormon 6:6) and what Joseph extracted (the plates of Mormon, cf. Book of Mormon Title Page) is generally resolved by the extra-textual presumption that Moroni chose the Hill Cumorah as the hiding place for his father’s record but selected a slightly different location on the hill, accounting for why Joseph did not encounter the large plates of Nephi in the stone box.5 Others have hypothesized that the Manchester drumlin and the Hill Cumorah are discrete locations.