Sidney S. Rigdon was born in St. Clair Township, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, on the 19th of February, 1793, and was the youngest son of William and Nancy Rigdon. On his father's side his forefathers were English; on his mother's, Irish. In his youth and early manhood he followed the vocation of a farmer and tanner. At the age of twenty-five he became associated with a Baptist society, and possessing a natural gift of oratory he drifted into the ministry of that society. He seems to have been much in doubt as to the Baptist church possessing the fullness of the truth, and he at last severed his connection with it and joined in the reform movement inaugurated by one Alexander Campbell, of Bethany, Virginia, founder of the church of the "Disciples," or "Christians." This new religious movement was very successful in what was called the Western Reserve, that region of country lying south of Lake Erie, and constituting the present State of Ohio. It derived its name, Western Reserve, from the fact that the State of Connecticut in ceding its claims upon western lands reserved to itself this magnificent tract for the purposes of a school fund. Among the settlers on this Western Reserve, I repeat, the doctrines of faith, repentance and baptism for the remission of sins, preached by Alexander Campbell, Sidney S. Rigdon, Parley P. Pratt and others, as the cardinal doctrines of Christianity, and the means provided in the gospel for man's salvation, had great success. Sidney Rigdon's labors in this new ministry led him to settle at Kirtland, where he had a large congregation, the members of which, in addition to accepting the primitive faith and ordinances referred to above, were also trying to carry out that order of things incidentally mentioned in the early Christian writings,[D] namely, none of them said that which he possessed was his own; but they had all things in common. [Footnote D: Acts 4:32-37.] Such was the state of affairs in Kirtland, and with Sidney Rigdon, when Parley P. Pratt and his associates arrived there in the fall of 1830, and presented the Book of Mormon to him, and preached the gospel of the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times.