M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

Joseph, Joseph, Joseph
The Temple Has Returned to Nauvoo
Photo Essay 3—Nightfall at the Nauvoo Temple
Photography: Scot Facer Proctor
Text: Maurine Jensen Proctor

Note: Click any images below to enlarge.

They built this temple believing that the ordinances they received here would strengthen and compensate them for the wilderness journey ahead. It must have been an odd sight-a glorious temple rising on the hill built at great expense and effort, while on the Nauvoo flats the people scrambled to find the means to journey west.

A reporter from the Daily Missouri Record wrote, "As a stranger passes through, he will find himself frequently beset mostly by women and children with inquiries, 'Do you wish to purchase a house and lot? Do you wish to buy a farm?'" Then the stranger would "be pressed and entreated to go and examine, and all the advantages [and] cheapness" of the property would "be fully explained."

Still the work on the temple continued. The reporter further observed, "Many of them are going with poor teams, and an amount of provisions insufficient for their subsistence for two months, if so long...If they should fail to make a good crop this year, at the stopping place, it cannot be otherwise than that many of them, especially and women and children and the aged and decrepit, must be sorely pressed by starvation; if many of them do not literally perish from famine on the plains...Of those whose condition is calculated to arouse sympathy are a number of women, many of whom have large families of children, inadequately provided with provisions, and without the assistance of protection of any male person. How they expect to get through the journey, we cannot conceive."

Like Priddy Meeks, many abandoned their possessions. "I had a small flock of sheep which I had not time to sell. These I left, together with my house and lot, the former containing my furniture and books."

They packed and re-packed wagons, trying to make room for keepsakes that would give them some sense of civilization in a new land. Some, in an optimistic gesture, hid their china in the bottom of privies, hoping they might someday come back to reclaim it. They never did.

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