It was a long Mormon day in Nauvoo, Ill. I got up at 7 a.m. and headed out for a free breakfast buffet at the restaurant run by the same people who own the motel I stayed at. I was at the Motel Nauvoo, which had to be one of the nicest places I’ve ever been. They have immaculate, homey rooms, and give you free cookies every night. Yum.
Then I headed down to the Nauvoo Temple, a stately building which overlooks the old Mormon town by the river. In this picture, you can see the temple on the right. On the left is St. Joseph’s, a Roman Catholic church built after the Mormons had to flee Nauvoo in 1846. (I took the choice of their patron saint as a barb against Jospeh Smith, but that may not be the case.)
This is not the original temple. After the Mormons left, the original one was destroyed by a fire and then a tornado. This one was built by the Church of Latter Day Saints in the 1990s and consecrated in 2002.
Nauvoo has a very storied history. In the early 1800s, various investors tried to settle the land and take advantage of its location along seasonal rapids in the Mississippi and profit when barges were forced to unload their cargo and pass on land. But it was a malarial swamp, and no one would take it.
But then the Mormons came along. After being driven out of Ohio and Missouri, the Mormons were moving farther and farther west, looking to establish a Zion from which their new church could emanate. So they were willing to take the unhealthy fields and try to turn them around as long as they could build a town which they could run as a theocracy.
They came in 1839, and Joseph Smith named the new town Nauvoo, which is a Hebrew construct of the verb “to be beautiful.” (נָאווּ) (Many Mormon detractors have said that this is not a real Hebrew word, and it’s true that it doesn’t appear in many dictionaries. But dictionaries generally show only root words, not conjugations. It is a real word.)
The Mormons were given a charter by the new State of Illinois, which allowed them to run the town as they saw fit, as long as their laws didn’t contradict the state constitution.
The city flourished. The Mormons found that the water causing the malaria was coming from the hills, not the river, and dug huge ditches to drain the swamp. The town became the fastest growing in all of Illinois, going from only 2,450 in 1840 to about 12,000 in 1845 – just behind Chicago.
In Nauvoo, Joseph Smith introduced many practices which make the Church of Latter Day Saints distinct, such as baptism for the dead and polygamy. Smith had received the doctrine of polygamy some time before coming to Illinois, but only here did he begin to teach it to other leaders. Here, Smith also ran for United States president, although he was soundly defeated.
Hundreds of houses dotted the plain in neat, four-acre plots, with plentiful commerce and new converts coming every day from across the U.S. and up the river from England and Scandinavia. The huge temple on the hill was even painstakingly built by volunteers from the town, and became one of the largest buildings in the country at the time. But the prosperity didn’t last very long for the Mormons, as it never did in those days.
Surrounding towns were wary of Nauvoo, which was growing in power, and could possibly take control of the county. They were unnerved by the town’s massive militia, the Nauvoo Legion, which had 2,000 armed guards. (It was ostensibly meant for protection.) So when Smith and Mormon leaders breached the constitutional right to freedom of the press, dubbing a newspaper critical of the church a “nuisance” and wrecked its press.
Because of this, Smith was to be brought to trial in nearby Carthage by a non-Mormon jury, which couldn’t have worked out well. He never made it to trial, though. After he and his brother Hyrum were brought to jail, they were lynched. The men who were to protect the jail only pretended to defend the brothers while about 200 men stormed the building and shot them. Mormons refer to this as the brothers’ martyrdom.
Using any excuse they could find to quash the new town, other areas of Illinois began to attack the Mormons, and shops and houses on its outskirts were repeatedly vandalized. In 1845, Illinois repealed the town’s charter. By the end of 1845, many of Joseph Smith’s followers decided to leave Nauvoo.
But there had been schisms within the church. Joseph had intended his brother Hyrum to succeed him as leader, and without him, it was not clear who should lead the church. About two-thirds of the church decided to follow Brigham Young, who led them to Utah and started the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
The Church of Latter-Day Saints only owns about half of the land of old Nauvoo, the rest owned by another branch of Joseph Smith’s original church. But before I go into that, let’s see some pictures.
First, I went to the visitor center run by the visitor center run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. A large, unremarkable building, it shows constantly repeating movies depicting happy, enduring townspeople striving to build a town of God in old Nauvoo. I have to say, while the missionaries working in Nauvoo were nice, they certainly weren’t as warm and unscripted as the Mormons I met in Palymra for the Hill Cumorah pageant. They really didn’t seem to want to engage with the visitors as much, but perhaps that’s because they have to do it all the time, whereas Hill Cumorah is only once a year.
This is the carriage that I rode in on a tour. The two horses in front are Charlie and Sam, the town’s only two permanent missionaries, as the driver put it, and have the same names as Joseph and Hyrum’s favorite horses:
The tour took us to many of the sites in old Nauvoo, many of which are reconstructed, especially on the LDS side. They have tried to turn old Nauvoo into a living museum, with staffed brick-makers, gun stores, a cultural center and anything else that you could possibly imagine. It felt a little bit like being on a ride at an amusement park. Everyone in the shops came out to wave when they heard the horses coming. I wonder if they do that because they want to, or because they’re told to. Probably both.
Almost everything on the tour was scripted to a T, and the guide was reading directly from cure cards in her hand. She said she had just started her mission, and didn’t know much by heart, yet. But she diligently pointed out every house of every major Mormon of Joseph Smith’s time that was still standing, from Brigham Young to Orsen Hyde, who went to Jerusalem to bring a divinely-inspired message that when the apocalypse came, the two millenial capitals would be the Jewish Jerusalem and the Mormon Zion.
As a lot of the converts at the time were immigrants, they obviously brought a lot of new languages to the town. Here’s an old house with something written in German, which I do not speak:
Along the trip, we alighted on Parley Street, which leads straight to the Mississippi River. This is now known by Mormons as the “Trail of Hope,” for it’s where Brigham Young led most of the people of Nauvoo westward across the frozen river. It’s lined with quotes of the travelers, and the following one by George Q. Cannon was one of my favorites:
“Those of us who can remember when we were compelled to abandon Nauvoo, when the winter was so inclement know how dark and gloomy the circumstances of the Saints were, with the mob surrounding out outer settlements and threatening to destroy us and how trying it was to the faith of the people of God. The word was to cross the Mississippi and to launch out into an unknown wilderness – to go where, no one knew. Who knew anything of the terrors of the journey thither, or of the dangers that might have to be met and contended with? Who knew anything about the country to be traversed? Moving out with faith that was undisturbed by unknown terrors. It was by faith that this was accomplished.”
After the horse-drawn carriage ride, I went and took another small ride by an ox-drawn carriage and then headed over to the Community of Christ, which owns most of the historical buildings occupied by Joseph Smith himself.
When Brigham Young and his followers left for Utah, Emma, the wife of Joseph Smith, stayed behind with her son, Joseph Smith III. A few years later, Sydney Ridgon, one of the most influential member of the early Mormon church, convinced her that her son, not Young, should lead the church. This eventually led to the Reorganized Church of Latter-Day Saints, which formally coalesced in 1860. This church was much more tied to the historical lands than the LDS church in Utah, which had a new mission to create the new Zion. Thus, the RLDS, now called the Community of Christ, owns many of the important Mormon sites, including Independence, Missouri, Kirtland, Ohio, and of course, half of Nauvoo.
The Community of Christ’s visitor center was much more sparsely populated than the LDS one. Although the two churches get along, and worked together to fend off the 2008 floods, it seems like many LDS members stay to their side when visiting Nauvoo.
Unfortunately, I was not allowed to take photographs inside any buildings when I was touring Community of Christ property. I don’t understand why groups do this. It’s not considered sacred space, there’s nothing in there that’s photo-sensitive, and it only impinges on people’s ability to save their memories and remember the history of the site. And it means you can’t see what the insides look like, even though they’ve been lovingly preserved and restored to look like they would have almost 200 year ago. Whereas the LDS church was making a lively, almost Disney-fied version of Nauvoo for a family getaway, the Community of Christ seemed to be striving for historical accuracy and somber reflection on the life of Joseph Smith.
But anyhow, here’s the outside of Smith’s original log cabin. The part on the left is the oldest, and was there when the Mormons arrived in Nauvoo, and was presumably originally used as a government outpost to watch the Mississippi:
In this house, Joseph and his wife shared extremely small quarters, and often were outside the cabin when Emma and other women had to tend to the many people ill with malaria from the swamp.
This post is already extremely long, and I’ll skip a step-by-step tour of every building facade, showing Joseph’s larger and larger houses, and the buildings that were started in the dream of a Zion, but never completed. Instead, I’ll just skip to the most fascinating part, at least in my view: the cemetery.
The story behind the cemetery was very moving, speaking to the gross animosity the Mormons faced in Nauvoo, a hatred that was so bad that they couldn’t even safely bury their dead. After Joseph and Hyrum Smith died, Emma held a funeral up on the hill by the temple, complete with a fake grave, as she was afraid people would come to desecrate the bodies. Instead, she hid the bodies under the Nauvoo house, which was in construction to be a massive hotel for visitors to the town.
But they didn’t stay there forever. At Emma’s request, in the fall they were moved to under the bee house (where they probably raised bees). No one knew they were there, and there were no markers. For years, the location of their burial was forgotten.
When Emma died in 1879, it seemed like no one would ever really know where they rested. But when the a flood threatened the approximate burial sites in 1928, the leaders of the Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints went in to action. With just some old writings that gave the location of the graves in vague distances from the Nauvoo House, it took them eight days to find the graves.
When the did, they re-buried Joseph, Emma, and Hyrum side-by-side, dividing her gravestone into three sections, one for each. You can barely see the old gravestone in the cemetery park now, as there’s a shiny new piece of granite on top of it:
There’s still such animosity to Mormons that survives in Nauvoo today. For instance, the Nauvoo Christian Visitors Center in the middle of town. The large majority of Nauvoo is not Mormon, but for the most part Mormons and non-Mormons get along. But this center is run by Christians who want to run the Mormons out of town again, and spend their time denouncing “non-Christian” Mormon beliefs. I wanted to go in and find out more (not out of support, but out of curiousity), but they were closed. All day. On a weekday. I guess they’re short-staffed.
This blog post is so long, but there’s so much I did today. But I’ll save some of it for my memoirs when I’m famous and leave you with a photo from the Monument to Women, a sculpture garden built on LDS grounds, intended to go beyond “a mere illustration of a woman’s roles to convey the universal qualities and concepts of womanhood to which all women can relate.” This statue is called “Courtship for Eternity,” as in Mormonism there is no “till death do us part,” and romance lasts forever.
