Latter Day Saints had been expelled from Missouri in the late 1830s, and settled in and around modern day Nauvoo, Illinois. By 1842, there was a congregation of around 100 members a couple miles south of the village of Kinderhook. Two residents of Kinderhook, a farmer named Wilburn Fugate and a merchant named Robert Wiley, were proselytized by missionaries using the Parley P. Pratt missionary tract "A Voice of Warning", that used the phrase, "Truth would spring up out of the earth". Fugate and Wiley decided to "prove the prophecy by way of a joke", and enlisted the help of village postmaster and blacksmith Bridge Whitton to create a set of six small plates of brass. In an 1879 letter to James T. Cobb, Fugate wrote of their creation: