The Temple: Forty Years in the Desert
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
The cornerstone of the Salt Lake Temple was laid on April sixth, eighteen fifty-three, exactly six years after Brigham Young first saw the valley. The building was not completed until April sixth, eighteen ninety-three, exactly forty years after that ceremony. The symmetry was deliberate. The wait was not.
The temple's construction stretched across four decades because the resources of a frontier settlement could not sustain constant building. Granite was quarried from the Little Cottonwood Canyon, twenty miles to the southeast, and hauled to the city by ox team before the railroad arrived. Each block weighed tons. The first years of construction moved by hand and animal across terrain that modern roads have made ordinary.
The Utah War of eighteen fifty-seven interrupted the work. When federal troops under General Albert Sidney Johnston marched toward Salt Lake City, church leaders had the temple's foundation stones buried under dirt and sod to conceal them, in case the army attempted to seize or destroy the unfinished structure. After the conflict was resolved and the soldiers moved on to Camp Floyd, the stones were dug up and construction resumed.
The Tabernacle, the oval building famous for its acoustics and its pipe organ, was completed nearby in eighteen seventy-five, giving the growing community a gathering space while the Temple stood unfinished beside it. The Tabernacle Choir had been organized in August eighteen forty-seven, the month the pioneers arrived, and performed regularly after eighteen sixty-seven. The Temple, once dedicated in eighteen ninety-three, was closed to all but members in good standing, which remains the practice today.
Forty years of building, for a structure the surrounding city has revolved around ever since.
