Kirtland Temple: The First House of the Lord
Near Cleveland, Ohio
The Greek Revival building at the center of Kirtland is the first temple ever built by members of the Latter Day Saint movement, and it holds one of the more remarkable stories in American religious history.
In eighteen thirty-one, Joseph Smith led a small band of believers from New York to this corner of northeast Ohio, seeking room to build a community and a movement. The saints, as they called themselves, were poor. Many worked as day laborers just to survive. But in the summer of eighteen thirty-three, they broke ground on a House of the Lord, pooling their labor and whatever money they could scrape together over nearly three years.
The finished building dedicated on March twenty-seventh, eighteen thirty-six, seated roughly a thousand people in two main halls stacked one above the other, each with tiered pulpits at both ends so that different orders of the priesthood could preside. By the standards of the Ohio frontier, it was extraordinary, a three-story stone structure with a bell tower and ornate plaster interiors that rivaled anything in the region.
The weeks surrounding that dedication became the spiritual high-water mark of early Mormonism. Participants reported visions, speaking in tongues, and what they described as pillars of fire above the building. Church accounts hold that Jesus Christ, Moses, Elias, and Elijah each appeared within the temple walls in the days that followed, delivering divine keys central to the church's mission.
Kirtland's golden moment did not last. A financial panic in eighteen thirty-seven collapsed a church-affiliated bank, the community shattered, and Smith led his followers west, first to Missouri, then to Illinois. The temple passed through the hands of multiple denominations over the decades.
For more than one hundred forty years the building was held by the Community of Christ, the reorganized branch of the movement. Then, in March of twenty twenty-four, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints purchased it for one hundred ninety-two and a half million dollars, along with eighteen other historic properties and a collection of early manuscripts. The oldest Latter Day Saint temple now belongs to the largest Latter Day Saint church, reuniting a sacred building with the tradition that built it.
