temple

NAUVOO, Ill.

Mormon hotelier and farmer William H. Walker heeded the call more than 150 years ago, devoting one in every 10 days to helping build a grand temple envisioned as the spiritual home of his fledgling religion.

Less than a decade later that temple lay in ruins, ravaged by fire and storm after persecution forced the Mormons to abandon the city they carved in the Mississippi River wilderness.

But today, great-grandson and hotelier Kay Walker spends one morning a week on the same high river bluff helping rebuild the temple. The project blends historic and modern craftsmanship and, for many involved, represents keeping promises unfulfilled when their ancestors fled in 1846.

"You feel like it's your temple," Walker said. "It makes everything come alive."

Mormons have other temples, but the Nauvoo Temple has special historical and sentimental importance. Mormons fleeing persecution in Missouri arrived at this bend of the Mississippi River in 1839. It was here that church founder Joseph Smith announced many of the holy revelations that became cornerstones of the faith. In 1841, he announced that a temple should be built.

The town grew along with the temple walls, but so did feelings of unease among neighbors, who became nervous about the unfamiliar and expanding community. Smith and his brother, Hyrum, were arrested on June 27, 1844, and jailed in Carthage, Ill. That afternoon a mob broke into the jail and shot the brothers. Within two years, their followers were forced to leave.

When the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1999 announced the Nauvoo Temple would be rebuilt, the site was a grass-covered block reminiscent of an abandoned town square. Fire -- some say the work of an arsonist -- consumed part of the original temple in October 1848; a tornado completed the destruction less than two years later. The stone was scavenged for other buildings.

Now, sunlight reflects from the high limestone walls of the 65,000-square-foot temple; a spire reaches more than 160 feet into the sky.

Architect Steve Goodwin said the reconstruction has been a balancing act between authenticity and the inevitable touch of technology.

"It's the idea behind it. We're trying to replicate what it looked like," he said. "There's some things where we've married the old and the new together."

The best examples are the 134 windows. They were built by Nauvoo resident Charles Allen, who has worked on restorations ranging from the Mark Twain House in Hannibal, Mo., to historic properties on Martha's Vineyard.

Each window casing was built using a 30-step method from the 1840s. Allen used more than 2,400 hand-carved square wooden pegs to hold the windows' joints together. The windows' design has been modernized, however, to make each double-pane insulated.

And unlike carpenters of old, Allen used an electric bandsaw.

"The only difference is we didn't use a foot-operated treadle, we used electricity. But it was the same process," he said.

The walls also blend present and past. The foundation was driven down to bedrock, and an interior shell of concrete was poured before the limestone went up. Old Mormon quarries near the river flooded long ago, so the limestone was brought from Alabama.

The most striking aspect of the exterior are the 90 sunstones, moonstones and starstones shaped like the original decorations and carved by several craftsmen. No two decorative stones -- or the dozen life-sized limestone oxen carved for the basement baptismal fount -- are exactly alike.

"The cool thing is when you look up there, you can see differences. That's what we wanted. We didn't want them to look like they came out of a mold," Goodwin said.

Inside, the floorplan has been changed, but endless details remain true to the original, from British carpet made using the same weaving process as in the 1840s to the 450 custom bronze light fixtures patterned after period hurricane oil lamps and candle sconces.

"We're in a time period when detail was simple. It was elegant, but it was restrained," he said.

Project manager Ron Prince, a retired church engineer, said Mormons with construction or trade skills have donated their labor -- staying anywhere from a week to more than a year -- just as their ancestors did.

"We believe in the church that we belong to," said Prince, also a volunteer at the site, which is scheduled to be completed in May.

Many who labored on the original never saw it finished. After the Smith brothers were killed, violence against Mormons continued until new leader Brigham Young agreed to lead his people from Nauvoo.

They began leaving in February 1846, and according to many accounts, the temple on the bluff was the last thing they saw as they headed west, eventually founding Salt Lake City. A small cadre stayed, finishing the temple three months later.

Mormons began drifting back to Nauvoo, about 150 miles northwest of St. Louis, when the church began buying property in the area in the 1930s. But it's the temple's rebirth that has many Mormons feeling their people's journey has come full circle here.

More than 250,000 are expected to visit the community of 1,200 in May and June, when an open house will be held before the temple is consecrated. After that, like all Mormon temples, it will be closed except to Mormons participating in church rites.

For Walker, who pitches in doing odd jobs at the temple, the project is both part of his faith and his heritage. A former insurance stockbroker in St. Louis, he decided to open a hotel in Nauvoo nine years ago. Once here he finally read William Walker's diary, a family heirloom he'd never paid much attention to before. That's when he found that his great-grandfather once ran a "mansion house" -- hotel -- for Joseph Smith.

Walker, 59, said in times of doubt he's encouraged by his ancestor's writings about the pride he took in working on the original temple.

"It's exciting, walking in his footsteps," Walker said. "I think he'd be very pleased with what I'm doing. We believe those who have passed on are rejoicing that the temple's being rebuilt."