Today marks the 200th anniversary of Mormon church founder Joseph Smith’s birth.

SHARON, Vt. (AP) – Mormon church President Gordon B. Hinckley paused and looked up at the granite obelisk, erected on a Vermont hillside, where church founder Joseph Smith is believed to have been born.

“Quite a monument,” Hinckley said. “Beautiful.”

Today, Mormons will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Smith’s birth.

Records from Smith family diaries place the birth here on Dec. 23, 1805. A hearthstone and a moss-covered front step are all that remain of the original 24-foot-by-22-foot home where the Smith family ran a small farm.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built and dedicated the 38-foot monument to Smith – one foot of granite for each year of his life – in 1905.

Hinckley, the 15th president of the church, was joined by one of his sons, six of his grandchildren and two great-grandchildren when he paid an early visit to the monument Thursday.

“This is the ground. This is the place. This is where it happened, this was the starting place,” Hinckley, 95, told reporters at the monument’s visitors center.

Smith founded the church April 6, 1830, in Palmyra, N.Y. He claimed God had appeared to him in a vision 10 years earlier, instructing him to restore the ancient church to the Earth. He later said an angel, Moroni, also appeared to him and led him to a set of buried gold plates, which Smith translated into the Book of Mormon, the faith’s foundational text.

Today, the church numbers a reported 12 million members in 160 countries.

Hinckley will speak to Mormons from Sharon, via satellite today, part of a celebration that will originate from church’s Salt Lake City conference center and be broadcast into church meeting houses around the world.

“There’s something very significant about the fact that we’re reaching back and forth, almost across this whole continent, in this bicentennial celebration, ” Hinckley said.

Hinckley said he didn’t know what Smith would make of such communications.

“I can’t read his mind,” Hinckley said, drawing laughter. “I think he would be very much amazed.”

The celebration will cap a year of Smith-focused events that included musical pageants and scholarly conferences. Hinckley himself called on church members to complete a full reading of the Book of Mormon before the end of the year, something he said he believed had produced a “great flowering of faith.”

It was important, Hinckley said, to mark the anniversary with a visit to Sharon, which is roughly 15 miles north of White River Junction, along the border with New Hampshire.

“This is a significant place,” he said.

Set upon a hillside and hidden behind a church meeting house, the monument is simple and quiet, except for the sounds of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir being piped through the stand of surrounding trees.

Quarried from granite in Barre, Vt., the monument’s obelisk is a single 40-ton slab of polished rock, set on a four-piece, 60-ton granite base, which was hauled in winter weather over six miles from a railroad car by teams of horses and moved up the hillside with the aide of block and tackle, church historians say.

About 55,000 people have visited the monument this year – far more than in previous years, said Grant Williams, of Kaysville, Utah. Williams and his wife, Sally, are serving a 24-month church mission as the monument hosts. About 20 percent of visitors are not members of the church, but almost universally, Williams said, visitors tell him the grounds have a sacred quality.

“They just feel that there’s a spirit here,” Williams said.