The Nauvoo Temple: Built in Seven Years, Burned in Two

On April sixth, eighteen forty-one, a crowd gathered on the bluff above the Mississippi for a ceremony that members of the church considered among the most significant they would ever witness. The cornerstone of the Nauvoo Temple was laid with formal ceremony. Construction had barely begun, the city was still being built from swampland, and the congregation was poor.

But Joseph Smith declared that a temple must be built, and the community committed to it. The structure was meant to be monumental. Its foundation measured eighty-three by one hundred twenty-eight feet, and the planned steeple was to rise more than one hundred feet.

Skilled stonemasons cut and hauled limestone from local quarries. The building took years to complete, consuming labor and resources the community could barely afford, built by converts who had been driven from Missouri and who would eventually be driven from Illinois before the temple served all the purposes it was designed for. Joseph Smith was killed in eighteen forty-four before the temple was finished.

Construction continued under Brigham Young, and the building was substantially completed around eighteen forty-five to eighteen forty-six. But within months the Mormon population was departing westward. In November of eighteen forty-eight arsonists burned the structure.

A tornado knocked down most of what remained in eighteen fifty. The Latter Day Saints never forgot the temple they had built on that bluff. Plans for a rebuilt temple at the same site were announced in April of nineteen ninety-nine.

Groundbreaking occurred in October of that same year. The new temple was dedicated on June twenty-seventh, two thousand two, the one hundred fifty-eighth anniversary of Joseph Smith's death.