“Sunrise and sunset on the Mississippi, with a brief day between—such is the capsulated story of Nauvoo the Beautiful,” observed President Gordon B. Hinckley. This comment visually captured the period from 1839 to 1846, when the Church was headquartered in Illinois.[1] However, with the restoration of numerous homes and businesses and the reconstruction of the Nauvoo Temple, the sun has recently risen again on this sleepy Mississippi River town. Over the past several decades, faculty and students of Religious Education at Brigham Young University, as well as Church membership as a whole, have watched firsthand while “Nauvoo of the imagination” has slowly come alive.[2] Indeed, the Church and BYU have returned to Nauvoo in powerful ways.

A Longing to Return

A longing to return to the City of Joseph originated with the Saints who abandoned their homes in Nauvoo to flee to the Rocky Mountains. “As a people or community, we can abide our time,” declared Church President John Taylor in 1882. “But I will say to you Latter-day Saints, that there is nothing of which you have been despoiled by oppressive acts or mobocratic rule, but that you will again possess, or your children after you. Your rights in Ohio, your rights in Jackson, Clay, Caldwell and Davis [sic] counties in Missouri, will yet be restored to you. Your possessions, of which you have been fraudulently despoiled in Missouri and Illinois, you will again possess, and that without force, or fraud or violence. The Lord has a way of His own in regulating such matters.”[3]

For Latter-day Saints, recovering Nauvoo’s glory began with the purchase of the nearby Carthage Jail in 1903, the first of what would eventually be dozens of acquisitions of historically significant structures for the faith during the twentieth century. In Nauvoo itself, the Church marked its first site in 1933 when Elder George Albert Smith joined Frederick M. Smith, president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, in dedicating a monument to the formation of the Relief Society near the site of the organization’s founding.[4] Later that decade, Utah businessman Wilford Wood made the first of what became ten transactions spanning a twenty-five-year period to acquire the entire Nauvoo Temple lot.[5] In the late 1950s, Salt Lake physician Dr. J. LeRoy Kimball furthered the town’s dramatic transformation when he bought and restored his great-grandfather Heber C. Kimball’s home. In the years that followed, Kimball and the organization he helped found, Nauvoo Restoration Incorporated, purchased and restored the homes of Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff, and Jonathan Browning, among many others, together with numerous business and community structures. The decades-long project expanded to include a pageant, shows, and historic tours, bringing Nauvoo the Beautiful to life.

Contemplating Zion

Faculty and students in Religious Education at Brigham Young University regularly participated in the Church’s return to Nauvoo. In 1993, professors focused their research on Church historic sites in and around the city, eventually publishing a volume entitled Regional Studies in Latter-day Saint Church History: Illinois. Additionally, Milton V. Backman, Susan Easton Black, Donald Q. Cannon, and many others dedicated decades of their careers to writing and teaching about Church history in Nauvoo, often spending extended time researching in the city while serving in Church programs. In the early 1990s, Professor Backman’s service as a missionary in Nauvoo led to the formal presence of BYU students studying in the City of Joseph. Pondering on the empty homes and dearth of visitors during the city’s winter months, Backman later recalled, “I thought, ‘Why not establish a BYU winter semester program in that historic site?’”[6] After leading forty-two students in a successful pilot study, Professor Backman was appointed as BYU’s semester-at-Nauvoo director in 1994. Using the city has a hub, students took field trips to New York, Ohio, and Missouri to study the history of the Church on-site.

Following the Church’s purchase of the Catholic school St. Mary’s Academy from the Sisters of St. Benedict in 1998, boarding-school buildings in Nauvoo were repurposed into the Joseph Smith Academy, the new home for the BYU program. Facilities such as dormitories, faculty apartments and offices, a gymnasium, a 600-seat auditorium, an exercise room, classrooms, and a library served as many as 120 students each semester. Located just across the street from the temple lot, participants enjoyed front-row seats to the building’s reconstruction. Students expressed the profound impact studying in Nauvoo had on their lives. “The city is so beautiful,” one student commented. “You can walk right where the Prophet [Joseph Smith] walked and go to his house and think about things. It is all right there. It is so easy to learn, you are immersed in the Spirit.”[7] Steven C. Harper, a student in the program and later a faculty member in Religious Education, wrote, “It was one of the most formative educational experiences I ever had to go there and to study . . . and to see history come alive in context. . . . Joseph Smith came to life.”[8]

In February 2006, BYU officials announced the discontinuance of the program that had brought as many as 1,200 students to Nauvoo over a twelve-year period. At the time, the university did not announce plans for Joseph Smith Academy, though one retired professor observed, “A large facility like this is always in need of maintenance.”[9] Although the buildings were razed a year later, students and faculty continue to frequent Nauvoo. In 2007, Professor Richard E. Bennett began taking students to Church history sites for a weeklong field study. More recently, the program has expanded to include a five-week summer component, much of which is focused on Nauvoo. In summer 2015, Bennett and fellow professor Craig Manscill are arranging to use Nauvoo again as a base for the program.

In 1841, the Lord directed the Saints in Nauvoo to erect “a house that strangers may come from afar to lodge therein” (D&C 124:23). While the Nauvoo House, as the building was called, was never completed, its purposes are fulfilled in the restoration of Nauvoo. Nauvoo has become a place where students of all ages can “find health and safety while [they] contemplate the word of the Lord; and the cornerstone [God has] appointed for Zion” (D&C 124:23).

Notes

[1] Gordon B. Hinckley, “Nauvoo—Sunrise and Sunset on the Mississippi,” BYU Studies 32, nos. 1–2 (1992): 22.

[2] Paul L. Anderson, “Nauvoo of the Imagination,” paper delivered at the BYU Nauvoo Sesquicentennial Symposium, September 21, 1989, as cited in William G. Hartley and Larry C. Porter, “Guest Editors’ Introduction,” BYU Studies 32, nos. 1–2 (1992): 13.

[3] John Taylor, in Journal of Discourses (London: Latter-day Saints’ Book Depot, 1883), 23:61–62.

[4]“L.D.S. Relief Society Memorial Dedicated,” Journal History of the Church, September 24, 1933, 6–7.

[5] See Lisle G. Brown, “Nauvoo’s Temple Square,” BYU Studies 41, no. 4 (2002): 4–45.

[6] Steven C. Harper, “History Is People, Places, Sources, and Stories: An Interview with Milton V. Backman Jr.,” Mormon Historical Studies 6, no 1 (Spring 2005): 116.

[7] Sarah Jane Weaver, “Semester Brings Nauvoo, Church History to Life,” LDS Church News, June 15, 2002.

[8] Steven C. Harper, “People, Places, Sources, and Stories,” 116.

[9] Sarah Jane Weaver, “BYU at Nauvoo Will Close in April,” Church News, February 4, 2006.