Departures of note

Levi McKeen Arnold, a foundry manager and banker in Poughkeepsie, New York, claimed that in the spring of 1851 he began receiving revelations from Jesus Christ through pencil movements, internal words, and answers to questions. He published these communications in 1852 in a book titled History of the Origin of All Things, written in a small bound blank book with a lead pencil over the course of about a year.

Arnold's text endorsed the modern spiritualism popularized by the Fox sisters in 1848, though it cautioned against indiscriminate access to other realms. It also commended the work of Rev. Charles C. Hammond, who published a collection of spiritualist articles titled Light from the Spirit World in Rochester, New York, in 1852. Arnold's writings claimed that the New Jerusalem began to descend to Earth on July 4, 1776, and predicted that religious freedom would be extinguished in Europe after 1851 but would find refuge in the United States.

Born on February 12, 1813, to Benjamin Arnold and Helen Maria McKeen, Arnold married Susan Robinson in 1844. His work was later endorsed in a similar publication by Archie Johnson Inger in 1908. Arnold died on September 27, 1864, in Poughkeepsie, and a descendant published a photograph of his gravestone online in March 2008.