The Tabernacle That Fire Saved

At two forty-three in the morning on December seventeenth, twenty ten, someone called in a fire at the Provo Tabernacle. By the time crews arrived, the interior was gone. What investigators would later determine: a three-hundred-watt lamp had been placed too close to a wooden speaker enclosure during rehearsals for a Christmas production.

That lamp started the chain of events that gutted a building nearly one hundred and thirty years old. The Provo Tabernacle had been built between eighteen eighty-two and eighteen eighty-five, designed by William Folsom, the same architect who worked on the Salt Lake Tabernacle and the Manti Temple. Its Victorian Gothic exterior featured a central octagonal tower rising one hundred and forty-seven feet, turrets at each corner, and interior spiral staircases.

Dedicated in eighteen ninety-eight, it could seat three thousand people. It was the architectural anchor of downtown Provo. The fire left only the outer shell standing.

The walls remained. For months, people assumed the building would be demolished. Then, in October twenty-eleven, church president Thomas Monson announced that the shell would not come down, it would be built back up, this time as a temple.

Engineers suspended the entire six-point-eight-million-pound outer wall on steel stilts forty feet in the air while crews excavated two new underground levels beneath it. A new foundation was poured under a historic exterior that floated above the work. The Provo City Center Temple was dedicated in two thousand sixteen.

The fire that seemed to end the building turned out to be its second beginning.