Nauvoo: The Beautiful City That Rose and Burned on the Mississippi
Near Nauvoo, Illinois
The town of Nauvoo sits on a wide bend of the Mississippi River in western Illinois, its streets laid out in the orderly grid that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, designed in the early eighteen forties. For a few years in the middle of that decade, Nauvoo was one of the largest cities in Illinois, a place of roughly twelve thousand people building a temple on a bluff above the river and conducting a religious and civic experiment unlike anything America had seen before. Then the experiment collapsed in violence, and the city emptied almost overnight.
Before the Mormons came, the site was a swampy trading post called Commerce, built on land that the Sauk and Meskwaki peoples had used for generations. Joseph Smith purchased it in eighteen thirty-nine, after Missouri's governor issued an extermination order against the Latter Day Saints and his followers fled across the Mississippi River in the bitter winter of eighteen thirty-eight to thirty-nine. Smith renamed the settlement Nauvoo, a transliteration of a Hebrew word meaning they are beautiful, and began the project of building a city on what was mostly malarial swamp.
The growth was extraordinary. Converts arrived from across the United States and from missionary campaigns in Britain and northern Europe. Smith obtained a city charter that gave Nauvoo unusual independence, established a militia called the Nauvoo Legion, and served simultaneously as the city's mayor, its militia commander, and its prophet and president.
By eighteen forty-five the city rivaled Chicago in population. It ended in eighteen forty-four with Smith's assassination in a nearby jail, and with the months of escalating conflict that followed. By eighteen forty-six most of the Mormon population had departed for the Salt Lake Valley under the leadership of Brigham Young.
The temple they had labored to build was burned by arsonists in eighteen forty-eight. A utopian French commune then moved into the city, tried to build a different kind of ideal community in the same buildings, and also fell apart within a decade. German settlers followed, planted vineyards on the limestone bluffs, and stayed.
Today Nauvoo is a small river town of roughly a thousand people. A rebuilt temple stands again on the bluff, dedicated in two thousand two. Restored historic buildings and stone wine cellars make it one of the most layered small towns on the upper Mississippi.
