Spencer: In the United States, along a sweeping bend of the Mississippi River sits the city of Nauvoo, Illinois. Starting in 1839, thousands of Latter-day Saints quickly transformed this swampy peninsula into a bustling city. At first glance, steamboat travelers on the Mississippi might have thought that they were drifting past yet another river town. But a certain sight would signal that Nauvoo was different. On the bluff overlooking the river—and at the heart of that city—the Latter-day Saints were constructing a temple.
When completed, the Nauvoo Temple would be the largest building on the Mississippi River at that time. But the builders of the Nauvoo Temple did not set out to construct a mere landmark. To them, it was a sacred edifice, a place for Latter-day Saints to worship God.
Still, when the people of Nauvoo broke ground on the temple, they did so with very little knowledge of what would transpire therein. Yet, they sacrificed immensely for the temple to make the promised blessings of that edifice a reality.
This podcast considers this sacrifice by examining what the temple meant to Latter-day Saints in the 1840s. And when we look at the Nauvoo Temple through the eyes of the men and women who built it, we begin to understand the deep significance of the temple to the history of the Latter-day Saints. That’s the goal of The Nauvoo Temple: A Joseph Smith Papers Podcast.
Speaker 2: All eight episodes available October 2021. Subscribe today wherever you get your podcasts.