Virtual Tour of Historic Kirtland Temple with Guided Commentary by Lachlan Mackay

i actually want to start today by thanking scott for being the technical host for this session and for several other sessions as well we greatly appreciate his technical expertise and support please do remember that this session is being recorded so that we can share it afterwards and therefore if you don't want your own image to be recorded then simply just turn off your video camera and that way we won't actually be able to record your image so thank you very much for being here and i want to welcome all of you to our second history tour our tour of kirtland and of course i do want to especially welcome apostle lock makai for joining us locke is the the scheduled guest minister for toronto reunion that of course was supposed to begin today and we are so grateful that locke has been willing to do uh some things for us in our new online camping format excuse me and i'm just going to uh briefly plug what lock will be doing next week starting on monday for five days monday to friday he's going to be doing a history class so please make sure that you tune in for the history class and of course for all the other events throughout the week of toronto and the other events being planned for the other uh camps lock thank you so much for your willingness to do this the navy session was fantastic i've really been looking forward to this one and we appreciate so much uh your knowledge your deep knowledge and commitment to sharing the history and legacy of the church with us all so over to you locke very kind david greatly appreciate it i uh it's a privilege to be with you i spent 15 years living at kirtland managing kirkland temple and eventually all the historic sites and i need to go back occasionally to give the tour so that i don't forget it but tragically of course i have not been able to travel for some time now so this is really helpful uh to make sure that i stay fresh on my kirtland history um i love kirtland temple it is the place where i consider that i had my conversion experience i was baptized at 10 but i feel like converted at about 23 when i walked into the lower court of the kirtland temple for the first time had a wonderful experience with the holy spirit there and and many others through the years i'm gonna share my screen and we're gonna talk just a little bit about temple construction the temple was built between 1833 and 1836 they hoped to build a brick but many of the bricks crumbled as they fired them and they were in trouble weren't quite sure what to do but then artemis millet came down from canada and saved the day he was in the kingston ontario area upper canada and brought with him this idea of building out of rubble rubble stone construction so they began to gather sandstone of various sizes and shapes and using mortar to hold that stone together they build a wall about two feet thick and about 45 feet high you see the exposed rubble here as we were replacing the stucco in 1955 so um they immediately cover that rubble with stucco which they described early on as blue it really was kind of a slate gray and then they paint mortar joints on the wall you could just barely see some of those painted joints so the goal is to make it look like it's big cut stone block would be the most magnificent structure you could put up at the time if you could afford to cut and dress all that stone of course they couldn't so they created that look out of stucco and paint they had sent young people out together old crockery and glass that was crushed even finer and dumped into the stucco so that when the sun hit it it would sparkle brilliantly the roof was wood shingles likely dipped in a red lead paint to preserve them and the front doors taken back a number of years ago to their original moderate olive green color so blue gray walls reddish brown roof green front doors pretty colorful early on unfortunately toned down through the years but really survived wonderfully and amazingly intact they hope to build two more of these buildings just to the south of the temple section 91 of the doctrine and covenants describes their plans the first building to the south was going to be a house for the presidency or an office building the second building to the south a print shop for the printing operations and the whole area from what is now maple street just north of the temple you can just see a little bit of it just to the right of the temple maple street was then whitney street to one block south still joseph street today that whole area was going to be their public square and again imagine three of these buildings filling that public square and the community centered around that square now interesting to know that we were going to fill the public square with sacred buildings which didn't really play well in the u.s with this idea of separation of church and state so normally of course you would put public buildings like a courthouse in your public square so i think the roots of some of the conflict particularly in missouri and in illinois can be found in this community building vision of blending church and state which again in the u.s doesn't play so well questions as i jump to our other screen if you do have questions at any point please just jump right in please remember that everyone is muted so if you do have a question you need to unmute yourself an easy way to do that is to hold down the spacebar on your computer and that will temporarily unmute you as long as you hold down the spacebar all right i'm going to try the screen share again lock who paid for this i mean was this essentially coming all out of the members uh simply contributing or did the church proper pay or something um i think most of it is members contributing and even like today with building projects um probably most of it i think many many contributed but most of it came from some larger donors um people like the tanner family or others who had significant resources they were able to help with and and in some ways nobody paid for it and in some to some extent and what i mean by that is we ended up um having to borrow money on it so i guess it's still paid for but we had to borrow 40 000 from mead stafford and company buffalo merchants and we mortgaged the temple as part of that i guess that's a little different issue than who paid for it though but uh um and i don't don't know if we were ever able to clear that mortgage what's a little puzzling though or a little confusing is that this is giaga county ohio in the 1830s but in 1840 lake county is split out and formed so it's possible that that the mortgage is registered when we're in chiaga county and it's cleared in lake county but the records didn't survive um a probably 40 to 70 000 building at a time when a farmer and their family might make twelve to forty dollars a month so um pretty pretty amazing other questions we're going to see if we can wander through the temple let me move you and go to full screen all right are you inside the foyer now great yes indeed so we're gonna do a virtual tour of the temple you see the the outer court so these people are inspired by old testament tabernacle and temple language so you walk into an outer court and then through these doors one here and one hidden behind into an inner court uh when you look up you see a bell rope hanging here they were trying to get a bell for the temple as early as 1835 wwe phelps one of their leaders so that a great effort was about to be undertaken to procure a bell for the lord's house i don't think that was accomplished though until 1890. that's the bell that's there now we bring it on sundays at nine o'clock in the morning there is some beautiful decorative woodwork in the temple some amazing work but depending on the age of the craftsmen they had very different styles at the time when you apprenticed you would go out and buy the latest edition of asher benjamin's architectural pattern books so depending on your age you bought different editions and just like taste style changes today it did then so if you were older you apprenticed using the 1806 edition of asher benjamin's book and it is very labor intensive a lot of the kind of stuff that you see here this is called fluting it's grooves carved into the plank to form a pattern so it is a lot of work a guy named jacob bump seems to be in charge earlier he's older using that 1806 edition so we'll see a lot of his work in the lower court or the first floor but bump got mad and left the church community for a time and a man named truman angel seems to have finished up he was younger he was using the 1830 edition of the book so you see more of his style here this is a greek fret pieces of wood cut out and applied to form a geometric pattern we'll see a lot more of that style on the second floor of the temple we are going to climb virtually 33 steps and go to the second floor and then we'll move into the upper court was the 33 steps uh done on purpose we like to think it was done on purpose but probably not um you know sometimes we think maybe one step for each year christ's life sometimes people think uh for each degree of free masonic ritual joseph smith would later in nauvoo became very involved in freemasonry and it had a lot of impact on the rituals that our cousins in the church of jesus christ do in their temples today um but i don't believe that there's really much masonic influence in this building so i you know maybe but if they did it intentionally they didn't write it down they didn't tell us why so the upper court this was going to be the home of something called the school of mine apostles as the name implies it was intended to be classroom space specifically for missionary and priesthood training one of the more unique features of the temple are tiers of pulpits on both sides of the room there for the two priesthoods you see here aaronic priesthood pulpits so p d a on the bottom is for the deacon's quorum presidency p t a for the teachers p a p for the priests and b p a on top for the bishops i don't know exactly what those letters mean they either didn't write it down in the 1830s or it didn't survive so pda might be presidents of the deacons of the aaronic priesthood or it might be presiding deacons of the order of aaronic or some other variation my guess is of the holy order of god is worked in it's probably a paragraph long i just know it's the deacon's corn presidency on the other end we'll see melchizedek priesthood pulpits of course has after melchizedek a high priest in the hebrew bible on the bottom a p e m for the elders quorum presidency an mhp for the high priests a pmh for the presidency of the kirtland high council it's a little confusing and then on top i wonder if we can get up there oh no we'll back up on top is a mpc um for the the first presidency or the presidency over the entire church they normally ignore these letters though and would sit not by office but rather by age with older members of top younger members down bottom by nauvoo in the 1840s the letters have evolved lots of cues mixed in by that time certainly for quorum and by the time those who go well west build their saint george utah temple the letters were a little different again what's most important about them is that they were a teaching tool everybody was a brand new member at this point and every time they walk in these letters would teach them the administrative structure of their new church again we're in an inner court here and we climb stairs in the outer court to get here and if you look up you see on the ceiling remnants of what they called curtains or veils simply room dividers at this point in time again more hebrew bible influence the plan was to wrap canvas around these massive wooden rollers and then using a system of ropes and pulleys that would go into the crawl spaces down into the columns and around windlasses inside these little doors i hope to put a crank on the side of this and start turning and crank these massive canvas curtains up and down so they were going to drop curtains in this opening right in the middle of the room as well as the opening running north south so one big classroom space was going to become four smaller ones the idea is they hope to be able to teach four subjects at the same time they never finished it on the second floor downstairs that system was in and functioning and used regularly you'll notice that there really is no front or back to the room the benches are not attached they slip back and forth to either side of the pew box and these deaths which are later editions flip up and lock into place so we can face either end depending on who's in charge at the time the pew box is simply their new england heritage so in many ways this part of ohio was called the new connecticut or connecticut western reserve so one of the kings of england had given connecticut acclaim to all of the land from their western border to where the water flowed some would argue all the way across the country so imagine this long narrow strip that connecticut claimed after our revolutionary war in order to give up that claim connecticut was given this part of what would later become of ohio but it couldn't be an extension of connecticut they had to sell it and they did to land speculators and the people who moved in were in many cases from connecticut or new england in the u.s so it's like imagine picking up little new england villages and dropping them on the shores of lake erie so lots and lots of new england cultural influence including in the way that they built their worship spaces so these pew boxes really common in churches in new england at the time talked about the windlasses that would raise and lower you see a better shot of some that actually got installed here so there's a little metal rod sticking out here again imagine turning a crank on that to raise and lower the veils then you see more examples of greek frets these are pieces of wood cut out and applied to the plank to form that geometric pattern other questions here there's no um no cushions on those hard pews is there any known reason for for why that was decided to to be that way no cushions on the these hard cues um i don't know why now it's possible it's because these are not the originals downstairs which was not a classroom space but a worship space we'll see in a little bit there is a late reference to a couple of benches in the back that had what they believed to be the original upholstery still on than the original cushions so it's possible that they were padded downstairs so i i just don't have a good answer for you but i can tell you that today in the lower court they are padded in the upper court as you see they are not so much more often whether it's worship or classes we meet downstairs other questions you you mentioned about the pew boxes being typical is the overall building uh typical are there other examples of this or is it quite unique so overall kirtland temple is very much a new england meeting house with some significant exceptions the things that are distinctive the things that make it different are the the tiers of pulpits on both ends that is quite uncommon another distinctive feature windows are on every wall of every room including interior walls like this one and the reason they did that for a hundred plus years an american church building tradition you would build a pulpit and you would backlight it with what was called a venetian or palladian window so when you spoke you would be highlighted by that light behind you and kind of draw attention to you if you take one of these nine pulpits one of them it's a very typical pulpit for the period but stretching them three across and stacking them three high not typical the window very typical but suddenly you have this interior wall so their solution is they put a big exterior window that we can't see out here that pulls light into this window to backlight the aaronic pulpits it also pulls light downstairs to backlight the aaronic pulpits of the first floor so really i think kind of an um a nice solution to the problem of how can we backlight these pulpits as well so the three distinctives tears of pulpits on both wood ends windows on every wall including the interiors the third distinctive is the fact that we have two large rooms stacked one on top of the other normally your second floor what you see here would be a gallery or balcony and people sitting up here on the sides or in the back would be looking down into the first floor so instead to have two rooms stacked almost identical room stacked very uncommon and i believe that grows out of the fact that that they built the temple for really just a few main reasons one is they wanted to be empowered by the holy spirit in this place what they called endowment an endowment means something later in in nauvoo but at this time they're turning to luke and acts where jesus tells his disciples to tarry in jerusalem until they are endowed or clothed with power from on high it's really important to them the other thing is they didn't have enough money to pay rent on the meeting house that they were worshiping in they needed a place to to gather for sunday worship but they also had been commanded to train or educate their ministers they need a place for a school and so those two desperate needs a place to worship and a place to educate their ministers result in these two big rooms downstairs the place to worship upstairs the place to educate the ministers really quite uncommon there are lots of uh lots of stories told about how joseph smith and sidney rigdon and frederick granger williams the first presidency of the church saw this building in vision and then they told the contractors what to build and this is the result i think that that we've misunderstood that i think they might well have had a vision but it wasn't the building it was the inner court and they actually come back to the church with dimensions that are found in the doctrine and covenants 55 feet by 65 feet well that's not the dimensions for the building that's the dimensions of these big interior rooms and the distinctive features that we just talked about are all found in the inner court in these inner rooms so i think it's a combination of inspiration and and the culture so that's why i see both new england context or new england cultural influences and some really interesting not common features great question what else who was the who would be the people that you know aside from the inspiration aspect pulling all of this stuff together like you know having a window over the aaronic pulpits and then a window behind that for the light to shine through like they they thought of so much who were the primary architects if you will of the whole design yeah so i'm not really sure that architect was much of a thing in the us at the time but there were master builders jacob bump is one that i mentioned and he knew how to build small frame structures he was coming out of i think it's silverton new york so it's not far from buffalo but it's it's on the lower coast of lake erie there and because he knew how to build small frame buildings he did some things that proved to be problematic so for example the timbers under the lower court of this building are massive girders massive wooden beams they're rectangles so of course they're strongest up and down where they're the thickest but they were a lot easier to work with if they were laid flat but you lose a fair amount of strength when you do that well they laid them flat because that's what bump knew how to do small frame buildings so by the 1880s one account says that the first floor had an 11 inch sag in it courtesy of laying that that girder on its side so again he gets upset artemis millet this master mason from canada comes down and i think artemis kind of saves the day he knew how to build massive stone structures he was building mills and things like that up there so um he probably is responsible for the structure of the second floor where they took those same massive timbers and laid them correctly kept them upright um others that were involved i talked a little bit about um truman angel he's not so much a structure guy as a imagine kind of a finnish carpenter kind of guy at this point i think brigham young and his brother made the windows i think john coral who is described as an architect at times is really more than kind of the supervisor of construction so those are probably the most prominent names among the folks involved with building we're going to climb another 33 steps and we are in the third floor where there are five attic offices or school rooms um the reason there are five of them i wonder if i can illustrate this a little better i'm gonna drop back down so notice these columns like here and columns here and then we're standing next to some there's you know here imagine when we climb to the third floor the walls that make these five long thin offices they're really king post trusses so they needed a way to support the roof we're in the attic on the third floor so they wrapped the trusses with lath and plaster and that's why there's these long thin rooms each room upstairs is just as wide as the distance from column to column so this bay is what becomes the room and and the trusses i talked about sit on top of each pair of columns so imagine stone piers in the cellar and then these wooden timbers run all the way through the building and then up above the trusses sit on top of each pair of columns and so when that all comes together you get the truss here so there's a central timber and that's why there are two windows instead of one there's braces that come up and braces that come down and that's the structure that supports the roof and again behind it the truss the result these long thin offices so another trust here trust here in five offices they held what they called the kirtland high school in these rooms in 1836 and 37. the students in this high school arranged in age from children to adults age six through adults three departments the first the juvenile department where they learned how to read and write they also had a classics department which was latin and greek languages and a an english department not just english but geography grammar arithmetic between those three departments they had 135 to 140 people a day up here in class sidney rigdon uh talked about what we were going to do with temples now he's talking far west temple 1838 missouri which didn't get built but what he said really applies to this one as well he said we are tired of our people being taken advantage of by the more learned we're going to use the temple to teach them to read and write to take care of themselves so this idea of using education to protect the impoverished um is rooted really early with us and he specifically says both both male and female boy and girl men and women and that's what we did they also held a hebrew school here on the third floor of the temple they hired a man named joshua satis to teach them hebrew he was really talented they were very blessed to have found him he had published his own textbooks and so in one of those you can find the word nauvoo carrying with it connotations of beautiful of course joseph would later use that term it shows up in isaiah a reference to beautiful mountains would use that to name a city they established where i'm sitting today in illinois uh church administrative quorums filled these rooms in the evenings high priest monday night 70s tuesday night elders wednesday night then finally this room that we're standing in was joseph smith's office it was there that the prayer of dedication for the temple was written and then delivered downstairs where we'll go next questions on the third floor do we know how this would have been lit how is it lit so the primary light source is the windows on every wall and they typically are gathering during the day in theory you could be here in the west room in the morning and get light from the rising sun in the east all the way through the building because of these interior windows that go in every every room they did meet in smaller groups at what they called early or first candlelight it's that part of the day i think when you first start to need a candle to see and they are selling lots of candle wicking at the nk whitney store at the bottom of the hill and not many lamp supplies so whale oil an option but expensive i think though more candles than anything else where where do the little miniature doors go where do those little miniature doors go so this is a knee wall so imagine the slope of the roof coming down then of course here's the floor they took what would be wasted space between the roof and the floor put a knee wall in and then put a door in so you could access that as storage so not not really other than storage not really usable space the nauvoo temple built in the 1840s was about 60 percent larger than this one and it was the same basic pattern although by that time joseph and naboo had introduced baptism for the dead by proxy so it had a finished basement with a font they also did a queen post truss system in nauvoo which means instead of one central timber they had two timbers pulled apart which allowed instead of all these walls one big open room on the third floor of that temple and finally because it was bigger what here is so small they're just little little cubbies little storage areas in nauvoo these were big enough spaces that they put offices in there other questions how did they heat the building they heat the building i think not very well they had four wood-burning stoves in a cellar all the way underneath in the winter months you would see stove pipes i wonder if i can find a minute's in the next room they'd have stove pipes that would come through the floors all the way up through the building and eventually come together in that one central chimney um i think there's a patch from one of the pipes there we leased the building as the folks headed to missouri with the bank failure um and it was a five-year lease to the western reserve teachers institute and kirtland seminary after just a year so they moved out complaining that there were too many steps and the temple was too hard to heat it was pretty difficult these are all original floors are these all original floors by far the majority of the flooring is original the building really survived amazingly intact what often would happen is if you have too much money you modernize so people got these buildings to put in elevators and bathrooms and pipe organs we just didn't have much money through the years but also in the 1880s when we started fixing up the temple we decided we wanted to make it look just as it did we were really focused on trying to make it look as it had in the 1830s i'd like to think that we did that because we were cutting edge preservationists but that was not our motivation instead we believed that if we had the original temple and it looked just as it did originally it would prove that we were the original church not those people in utah so it was rooted in identity issues but as a result even today no bathrooms for example it really survived very much intact let's head to the first floor so this is the lower court let's claim the pulpits because it's probably something that most of you won't have a chance to do but it is amazing the perspective is something so if you were in the very top center pulpit this is what you would be seeing this is typically where joseph smith senior sat the father of the founder of the movement so this is the lower court that was the place where they would come to worship on sundays they would have hymns and sermons and prayers and testimonies they would go home for lunch they would come back for more hymns and prayers and sermons and testimonies they would go home actually they would also serve communion or sacrament you see the sacrament table the communion table here there's one on both ends these flip up and lock into place after that afternoon session you go home again and then some would come back for choir practice and there are lofts for acquired lofts one in each corner and they would sing from all four corners at the same time there were curtains or veils in this room in and functioning in the 1830s but it was a different design to what they were trying to do upstairs i think they got this one in but it didn't work so well so they redesign it are in the process of installing it on the second floor and never finish here what they had were metal hooks set into the plaster now go on and then there was canvas suspended from the hooks and then you see what looked like little white powdered donuts set into the ceiling these had ropes going through them and there was a system of windlasses and pulleys and so the idea was once again you would be able to stand at one of the columns and and crank away at a windlass and using these ropes and pulleys you could raise and lower these massive curtains so just like upstairs they're going to drop right down the center as well as the center running north and south so one big worship space becomes four smaller ones they use these for thursday prayer meetings they'd fill up the room drop the curtains assign an elder to each corner and have four prayer meetings going at the same time even with four going at once some of these meetings would go from ten in the morning to three or four in the afternoon we talked about lighting earlier on the lower court we have physical evidence that they had candle burning chandeliers hanging there's a metal hook right in the middle imagine some kind of a candle burning chandelier they never describe it we don't know if it'd be turned wood or tin but the soot from the candles would rise and be trapped by those plaster rings so it made cleaning a little easier we have pictures later this filled rings up above i talked about jacob bump earlier the older guy using the earlier crafts or earlier edition of the pattern book this beaded keystone right here in the center kind of lost it well i'll try and back up that beaded keystone is a great example of jacob bumps style it comes right out of the 1806 edition of the pattern book so right here it's kind of hard to see but there are these beautiful little wooden beads carved in on both sides so hugely labor intensive to create this keystone jacob 1806 style we're going to try and sprint to the other end that didn't work so well this keystone is flat just imagine a flat board with little holes drilled in it to form a pattern so much much simpler much much quicker than the one upstairs so we think this is likely truman angel's style the younger guy the later pattern book versus the jacob bump style on the other end and on the columns here these are fluted again grooves cut into the pattern or into the surface of the plank to form the pattern remember upstairs we saw frets pieces of wood cut out and applied to form that pattern these pew boxes are for visiting dignitaries you see our hymnal collection so people sitting in the sides might be the high council of missouri or the seven presidents of 70 during the temple dedication members of the council of 12 were sitting on the side they didn't actually have seats in the pulpits because they weren't supposed to be home at the time they were the traveling high council meaning they had authority basically in the rest of the world but not where the church was organized in kirtland or in other places where the church was organized it was the standing high council who had authority so really distinctive distinct lines of authority early on standing high council in charge and stakes traveling high council or the apostles in charge in the rest of the world it was in this room that the temple was dedicated march 27 of 1836 for that service they squeezed 900 to 1 000 people into this room according to joseph smith that was as many as could be comfortably situated children were on the laps of adults every seat and aisle were crowded their service lasted for seven to eight hours with sidney rigdon preaching that day for two and a half hours joseph smith's prayer of dedication about a half an hour long there were months surrounding the temple dedication where the people were recording in their journals incredible spiritual experiences they talk about the temple being filled with the sound of a mighty rushing wind they talk of people speaking and singing in tongues interpretations of tongues they talk about seeing what looked like angelic figures dressed in white walking back and forth across the rooftop a pentecostal season this was described as it really was a glorious time in the life of the church maybe the the culmination of that april 3rd 1836 it's one week after the temple dedication there's once again a sunday afternoon service going on once again a thousand people present the curtains out here are dropped so this space is for they're blessing babies and confirming converts while that's happening joseph smith and oliver cowdery go into the pulpits to pray they drop these massive canvas curtains around them for privacy as they finish they stand and they record a vision of the lord on the breastwork of the pulpit before them coming to accept the dedication of the house so i think it's interesting that i often have thought we didn't pay attention to the christian calendar the liturgical calendar until after vatican ii you know beginning maybe 60s or 70s 1960s or 70s then we and other non-catholics started to engage a little bit with the christian calendar um but i think it's fascinating that that vision that joseph and oliver had of the risen lord april 3rd of 1836 is easter that's easter sunday and we sang for the first time one week earlier on march 27th of 1836 of the dedication the spirit of god like a fire is burning and the chorus of course hosanna hosanna and that's palm sunday so shouting hosanna along with the rest of chris christendom on palm sunday in kirkland temple questions how many people are in the church at this time how many people were in the church at the time so there's probably 2 000 members living in the kirtland township at the time and i am going to guess maybe 5 000 members maybe a little more and maybe a little more by this time by the time joseph's killed in 1844 there's probably 30 000 members around the world so lock i i just learned something new when you were talking about the the vision that they had of christ i had always imagined that they were completely alone in the building at that time and so when you described that in fact um the room was separated with the curtains but there were you know other people in other areas can you share a little bit about the the the circumstances of the visions uh um involving elijah yeah so that's the same experience christ moses elias elijah and what i shared is two different journal accounts put together so i should clarify that it's possible that all of these people left but but we don't have something saying that they did what we have is a journal account saying here's what's happening out here and the journal account saying here's what's happening here so i do think that they're at the same time um uh so so following the vision of the the lord on the breastwork of the pulpit before us coming to accept the dedication of the house our visions of moses elias elijah and so that same experience same day april 3rd of 1836 and it's joseph's journal and i always i think it's in the handwriting of warren perrick i always forget warren parish and warren cowdrey i get him confused but it's somebody who who didn't stay with the church but it's in their handwriting the last entry in joseph's kirtland diary other questions so they did baptisms in the river or the there's water close by yeah there's a river down below the east branch of the chagrin river so the temple sits on a river bluff um and then the east branch of the chagrin river is down in the valley and that's where they did baptisms if they could although there are accounts of them going six miles to the frozen lake erie and chopping holes in the ice for baptisms um in the 1840s here in nauvoo joseph introduced baptism for the dead by proxy done initially in the mississippi river and there were some baptisms for the dead by proxy done in kirtland in the chagrin river but fairly quickly joseph realized that people were really appreciated that opportunity and he thought they probably were spending too much energy on that and not enough energy on building the nobu temple so he fairly quickly said you can't do that anymore until the nabu temple is finished so they stop doing them outside of the temple of course kirkland has no baptismal font in the temple there is a cellar underneath this floor it's about six feet deep with a dirt floor so unfinished space how do you access the bell tower how do you access the bell tower let's see how close we can get gotta say that that's not nearly as labor intensive as claiming the 66 steps so this is an original window from the east end looks like that's as close as we're going to get so those steps lead up into the bell tower there's a door here and then you keep going upstairs and eventually you're in the tower when i was there as an intern friday the 13th must have been i don't remember the month but uh 1992 i was having dinner in a little building next door to the temple and suddenly the phone rang and it was the fire department saying that the temple was on fire and wanting somebody to meet them there to let them in so they didn't have to to take their axes to the front door so i sprinted across in the process of running i lost my footwear i think i was wearing sandals got to the front door just in time to meet them got the door open they started dragging their hoses up 66 steps they ran out of hoes had to get more going um we kept going right up above there's a window just above this window and you climb so here's the trap door that's how the bell got hauled up into the tower one of maybe four trap doors but there's a window just to the right and you climb out of that window to get on the roof but by the time they got up there they wouldn't fit out the window because of their respirator and air tanks and etc so they had to strip all that gear off finally got onto the roof and right up here there was a small fire what happened is there were painters at work on the bell tower they had laid tarps over flood lights which came on that night automatically on a timer and started a small fire the damage was repaired in just a couple of days but by chance we were doing major work on the tower so there was scaffolding wrapping it for a year so in the minds of all the locals the the scaffolding on the bell tower is the result of this fire and it was a major fire the reality is it was pretty small but it was pretty scary um we have been on fire at the temple many times through the years on one occasion in probably the 1880s cassie kelly who was married to i always forget if it's el i think it's e.l kelly one of the apostles he was gone for months at a time so cassie is the de facto caretaker of the temple she came upstairs one morning and looked up and this ceiling in the in the room next to the bell tower had burned out completely in the middle of the night it was gone but the fire had gone out probably again a problem with a stove pipe on another occasion mr yaxley was tinning the bell tower roof and coals from his furnace blew down and started several fires they could get onto the roof and put that fire out but some of the coals landed on the cornice which is just outside this wall so you're 45 feet up at this point of course couldn't reach the cornice so they had to chop a hole through the wall so where the stone stops at this level anything above his wood so they had to chop a hole through the wall to get to the cornice to put out that fire on another occasion in 1904 lightning struck mcfarland's barn next door and hit the temple and set both ablaze the locals came running got a bucket brigade ready but had to decide whether to save the barn or to save the temple fortunately they chose the temple other questions how much of the tempo as it is now is original material um i'm just going to have to guess on how much of the temple is original material let me say that we have re-roofed multiple times repainted re-plastered re-stuccoed windows and outside walls were removed and put in storage so we still have the originals but these are new made to look old windows and interior walls like this one's still original so it's starting to sound like we've done a lot of work and we have but i'm guessing still 85 to 90 of the material you know all the stone all the timbers um the structure is still there so it really is very intact now there were times in the 18 oh probably 60s and 70s when people like us would come through the temple and decide that it wasn't going to survive and we decided to help out by saving small pieces for posterity which is a nice way of saying people were stealing decorative woodwork and so for example this chevron running along the side of the steps most of those were stolen but but when you pull that off the paint ghost makes it very clear what was there so it was not hard to restore but letters on the pulpits were stolen as well but you know again i'm talking about a lot of stuff that was taken but the reality is it's really amazingly intact right down to the original handrail you see on the left the one on the right we put in later i learned in sunday school a hundred years ago that it was used as a barn at one time and they stored hay in it and yeah we have said things like that more often our cousins in the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints have said things like that i don't think so i think what happens is somebody's coming through in about 1859 and saying well i do think let me clarify i do think that at times the seller and there's a door just out here into the cellar underneath joseph iii says that when he came through it was open for the free ingress and egress of sheep and hogs what i think he's really saying is that that the doors were just left open at times and at the time you didn't fence animals in you fenced animals out and so there was no fence around the temple so something could wander in and was there until it wandered out i think part of that also is people didn't understand the pew boxes and so when they because they are so far removed from new england culture eventually they saw these pew boxes and decided that they were lambing pins so i i just don't think i just don't find evidence to support the templars barn tradition i do find evidence to support the at times the doors are just open i also think some of that with our utah cousins was an attempt to make us make them feel better about the fact that they were not able to hold on to it it's true it's not in our possession anymore but it's okay because it's desecrated it's not the lord's house anymore is the mindset i think so who has the title to the temple now who has the title to the temple now so let me start really early um there are four strands of title and all of them had some problems at times there are people selling the temple before there's any record that they own it at times the temple is in joseph's name on behalf of the church and at times the temple and his hit is hitting his name personally when he is at risk of losing it to creditors in the 1830s he signs it over to william marks the kirtland stake president who not long before joseph's death signed it back to joseph so at joseph's death the temple is in his name in behalf of the church after his death as we begin to fragment of course we all went the temple and so members of the council of 12 convinced william marks to sign a quit claim deed conveying what he had to them what a quick claim need is saying whatever whatever claim i have i give to you so if my claim is clear if i have um clear ownership now so do you but if if i don't have anything neither do you so what's the problem with william mark signing a quick claim to the 12 after joseph's death you'd already send it back to joseph yeah he'd already signed it back to joseph so he didn't have anything to convey but to try and strengthen that claim the 12 then sell to george edmonds jr a non-member friend of the church and i think it goes for maybe ten thousand dollars um then it sells to somebody else and eventually it comes back to the 12 for maybe a dollar so these are not real transactions they're attempts to to kind of strengthen the claim um james strang gets involved in the picture he soon has many followers in kirtland he's preaching for eight hours at a stretch here and he is saying wait a minute the deed says that the temple goes to joseph and the first presidency and remember that the 12 didn't create the first presidency initially so strang is saying i'm the only the only claimant to the presidency so clearly i own the temple uh it got even more confusing in 1859 when um grandison newell who was public enemy number one if you were latter-day saint in kirtland he really didn't like us and we didn't like him he convinced his friends in the ohio state legislature to pass a law specifically so that joseph smith's properties could be sold to pay any debts resulting from the kirtland bank failure so that eventually works its way through the courts the temple and 13 acres sell on the courthouse steps for i think it's 150 um the guy who buys it happens to be um grandison newell's grandson-in-law he keeps the 13 acres free and clear and then sells just the temple to russell huntley and joseph smith iii for 150 they think that they are buying it personally and joseph iii is going to sell it to the city of portland for a town hall but kirtland says wait a minute we don't think you own it we think it's church property and joseph iii backed up and said yeah i think you're right so out of that grows the kirtland temple lawsuit of 1879 and 80. um we have profoundly misunderstood this suit now we had an attorney saying if you don't do anything the church will own the temple free and clear by 1881 through adverse possession which in ohio means if you possess something proclaim to the world that you own it somebody has 21 years to object and if they don't your cloudy ownership becomes clear through adverse possession but instead of just waiting one more year we decided to put together this lawsuit because really it wasn't about temple ownership for us it was about again identity it was about proving to the world that we were joseph smith jr's church so we put together this lawsuit for unfortunately our local council didn't show up but we went ahead anyway um we had given the judge kind of our our argument nobody showed up for the mormons because it was in the middle of the cohabitation hunts the polygamy hunts they would have been rested the judge took our argument and just basically read it back to us so he said the reorganized church is the true and lawful successor to and entitled to the property thereof joseph smith junior's church wow that's pretty good stuff for us but then the judge said but you filed the case wrong case dismissed what so it's like it never happened the kirkland temple suit has no legal bearing um almost certainly but i'm not sure what happened i think our our attorney was so embarrassed that he lost the case where nobody showed up that he just struck the last sentence of the judge's ruling and just sent the good language back west that might be what happened or maybe we knew and we just we're not honest about it i don't know but many of us were raised with this kirtland temple finding kirtland temple suit finding when it turns out it it really uh it was dismissed it was like it didn't happen but the result of that joseph iii um gave possession to his church so we had owner clear ownership as early as 1881 or as late as 1901 depending on how conservative your legal interpretation is that was my longest answer anything else how often is the temple used now well right now it's not used at all we're shut down for coven but typically about about once a week some kind of service or class and what is the membership in curtin membership in kirkland is probably 50 60 maybe more at times it's been a really big congregation but it's been really big because it turns out we were very intentional about encouraging people to gather there so in the 1880s there was a significant focus on gathering i think that happened again in the 1920s now it's really expensive to live in kirkland if you've not been there for a long time it's a very desirable place to be so and there's also you know our congregation's fortunes rise and fall with the economy so i'm guessing there are there might be a hundred on the rolls but there's probably 30 to 50 that are active if i can figure out how to do it i'm going to stop my screen share and see if you have any other questions all of your all of your answers have been so detailed is there is there is it written down all the history of the the um the ownership and all that kind of thing is is that written down or not um so the history of the ownership is written down by kim loving who was our stake president in kirtland years ago an attorney and it's in a mormon history association journal so i think you can find it online if you would google kim loving kirtland temple ownership i think you can find that article um so what i've share what i've shared comes from lots of different sources um barbara walden and i have an illustrated history of the kirtland temple which is through harold house i think which is just kind of a small lots of photographs book but some of it's in there um maybe the best book on kirtland right now though is probably mark staker's hearken o ye people which is a really nice history of the church in kirkland how many visitors do we get in a year in normal times how many visitors in a normal year probably 28 to 40 kind of ranges somewhere in there a thousand let me clarify a thousand how is it heated now how's it heated now so we i love your backdrop now sorry i just joined the um we have um boilers natural gas-fired boilers outside the building so years ago we decided to move all combustion out of the building early on early meaning early 20th century we had a boiler across the street in the congregation and then steam pipes going through a tunnel under the street to the temple the locals talk about how new kids in town you'd invite them to to go sledding by holding onto the back of the bumpers of cars and they kind of pull you along the snow-covered street and you would trick them because you wouldn't tell them about the part where the steam tunnel was where of course there was no snow on top of it what a terrible thing to do to the other kids but now the boilers are just next to the temple outside and a number of years ago it's been quite a while now then president hinckley of the lds church was in nauvoo for the dedication of the nahu temple reconstructed and by chance he came to a memorial service that we have done every year on june 27 for joseph and irem smith the day that they were assassinated and he was talking to president mcmurray at that service and commented that he knew that there were a lot of lds visitors coming through kirtland and he'd like to help somehow and offered to make a contribution so he was kind enough to send 25 000 which our historic sites foundation matched so we took that 50 000 and put a new um new heat system in so really high tech again combustion outside but all the controls in the cellar of the temple and paid for in part by the generosity of our friends in the lds church you said earlier there were no bathrooms in the temple originally are there any there now there are still no bathrooms in the temple yeah i'd hate to you'd have to gut it and you know some something you'd have to tear up something pretty significantly to put them in the part that i don't feel good about is it's also not accessible was the bell installed shortly after the completion of the building so the bell was supposed to be installed maybe even before the completion of the building but i don't think they get it until 1890. did the bell that wasn't sold have a particular significance no the bell that was installed is the one that's still there and they got it on sale from the buckeye bell foundry in cincinnati ohio because somebody else had ordered it and then didn't pay for it it weighs either a thousand or just over a thousand pounds you still use it at all we still use it sunday mornings at nine o'clock we ring it 50 times to call the locals to worship so this is my first attempt at a guided virtual tour what what would make it better was it did anybody get seasick except me no it was great any feedback would be appreciated um uh because i think we're gonna have to so we are we are doing um zoom based tours five days a week in kirkland so you you can go to the kirtlandtemple.org site and seth bryant it's generally at two o'clock eastern there's a small preservation fee but you you can walk through the temple with seth and using the chat feature ask questions um so it's it's a little different than this experience because we were using of course the pre-recorded 3d virtual tour with seth you'd actually be live soon i noticed you had a couple of other floors there do you actually have footage of the the in-between floors so i don't well let me look um maybe so the other floors are the interstitial spaces created by the vaulted ceilings so if you want if you want a curved ceiling and you want a flat floor on top of it then by default you're going to have space on either side and and the way that the 3d modeling worked the only way they could account for the space is to call it another floor so what it really is is the crawl spaces in between i don't let me see if i have something in a powerpoint um you know they were planning a temple in independence missouri at the same time uh but it was going to be a little different there are architectural drawings of that building that survived it's really long and low and shed like and what was happening is that um they forgot because they weren't master builders they forgot that a crawl space takes up space or a ceiling vault takes up space they forgot that floors are thicker than a pencil line they forgot that ceiling joists are thicker than a pencil line so if you raise the roof of their architectural drawing to account for the structure and for the curved ceilings then you get something very much like the kirtland temple turns out i don't have a photograph of the space but it is um well it's not very exciting you poke your head in and you look right and you'll see the back side of that wooden vault and if you look the other direction you're gonna see the exposed rubble wall and it's probably just over five feet high in there so i might be able to just barely stand well now i can't stand up in there but it's close look i'm not sure how difficult it would be to go from um the temple tour that we did to stills because you had the um you tried to show the end frat work and we're having had a little bit of difficulty so i'm wondering whether um having a few stills of some things like it that was interesting too the question about the crawl space so having a few stills but can you get in and out i don't know so you can but it's a little cumbersome let me so i do have some of those so let's uh let's try it if i can do a screen share let me know if you can see my screen now europe it's great yep so i think it works usually but not always so that interstitial space i was talking about what labels what the the program labels as other floors so this would be floor 2 but it's really just the space in between is my cursor showing up yes it is yep let's see what else there's the frets uh this so these are details from the architectural manuals you see an engraving on the left and then the actual template window on the right aha there we go see that's perfect yeah so if i made a powerpoint with just a few features like that that that are hard to to zero in on i think that would work well i appreciate that suggestion this would be a good one to show you too we put the veils back in so this is not the original system that gives you some idea of what it might have looked like you see up near the ceiling the sun destroyed the canvas eventually these are some of the groups that were coming and going through the 1840s and 50s latter-day saints of different varieties our current branch our current congregation dates to 1886. here's the chains of title we talked about pretty messy pains me that we had that sign on the front for the longest time can you read that built by the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints 1834 reorganized church of jesus christ of latter-day saints and succession by order of the court well not really oops yeah anything else the the various um places that uh you showed us that would not be on a normal tour like the the storage spaces and the floors between the floors and so forth are all those areas would you say still structurally sound yeah i'd say the temple is more structurally sound today than it has ever been because we've done a lot of strengthening so for example on the third floor they in the 1830s installed the floor joists three feet apart when they should have been um maybe 12 16 inches i don't know not nearly as wide as that and so um we limit pretty carefully we we added additional joists but still limit the number of people that they put up there they had the same problem in nauvoo they had the second meeting of 200 plus people on the third floor of the nabu temple by the end of the meeting the doors were no longer closed and the plaster was falling off the walls the the walls the sandstone walls um really only started about two foot thick so today you build a footer a wide base to spread the weight out and then the narrow wall would sit on that that they didn't understand that and so we did compaction grouting to inject kind of concrete kind of stuff into the ground underneath the walls and the piers to strengthen it um they took these beautiful floor joists maybe 12 inches but notched the end down to insert them into some of the timbers so lost half the strength in some cases and they have a tendency to fail to split so we put metal joist hangers throughout the building ceiling joist hangers floor joist hangers um so structurally it's in pretty good shape now having said that we do get earthquakes in kirtland and it is you know the the ground i'm sorry the compaction grouting that we did helps but i would not say that it is seismically retrofitted in a way that would withstand a major quake and the reality is we just don't have the money to do that you were saying earlier that somebody sold the temple back of the 13 acres or whatever it is so did they ever get the rest of the land under the same title or no so we never went back and tried to squabble over the 13 acres if you're talking about things that might enhance the presentation it would be fabulous if you had some drone footage uh flying around showing the outside of the temple just sort of where it's situated and all that would definitely add so we do come to think of it and we also have drone footage inside the temple as i think that through so i'll see what i can do drone footage inside the temple that sounds dangerous yeah it was um it was a production company that was doing a what was it well it was some television production um yeah probably about as dangerous as some of the rigs that our friends in the church of jesus christ have set up i don't know if any of you have spent time on film sets but they build these really elaborate tracks for camera dollies so they can get these beautiful long smooth shots and some of them were built you know 15 foot up across the room across the top of the pulpits and pretty amazing we tried desperately to be very careful though you uh live in nov in uh kirtland i lived in kirkland for 15 years and then in 2007 moved to nauvoo oh okay and your assignment as apostle is my assignment is the northeast u.s field so basically michigan to maine to virginia and then i also have as a functional assignment historic sites and the church history and sacred story team yeah they can't ever take that away from you it's just you're you're just wonderful and a wonderful teacher i love the story yeah yeah for sure thank you i feel like if we were going to write a foundational story to support today's missional focus it would be hard to write a better one than the one we inherited you know our our rootedness in in violence and poverty and persecution um i i think if we let it really can inform um what we're trying to do today and i think there's so many lessons from our past that can improve the world in which we live today if we will just listen lachlan did you mention the visitor center i missed the very first of this production i didn't we our our virtual tour doesn't include it but it is a wonderful beautiful building um opened in 2007 uh kind of what i work towards with lots of help from lots of talented people and lots of generous donors including wonderfully generous canadian donors but we managed to get the visitor center dedicated in 2007 and then i packed the moving truck the next week to move to nauvoo never even got into my office when you do the history lesson next week will part of that be this there will definitely be some crossover but we won't actually do the tour like this simply because we just just did but i'll probably delve more into things like the kirtland bank um probably talk quite a bit about the concept of endowment or spiritual empowerment that was so critically important to them um i'll probably talk uh well and hopefully answer lots of questions then too but we we won't do the virtual tour next week you were talking about the visitor center i was down there for a conference with david brock on the with the evangelist and we're in this one room and there's a window there that had curtains on it and we were all sitting there and he opened the picture window and there the whole temple was right in front of us beautiful beautiful experience it's pretty amazing inspired by disney world wow the last last time i was there lachlan was probably around 1970 when my father was living and i remember he was very interested in the dugout the basement card i remember the big stones and then he and i went right up outside into the bell tower where we got a bird's-eye view of everything i understand you can't go up there now well we do offer now a basement to bell tower behind the scenes tour so it's very small groups um appropriately dressed and we we do we actually probably don't take the tours outside on the bell tower but we let them climb up and poke their head out of the hatch oh we stood right up there and looked right around it was beautiful one of my fondest kirtland memories for years we would watch fireworks uh our national holidays from the top of the bell tower oh wow nice it's nice the way it's been kept up since well like 1970 if i were to go back i'm sure i'd be very proud of how it's been kept up looks pretty good it's it's i mean as you can guess it's hugely expensive to maintain historic buildings yes um so you know like the paint the sandstone around the windows and the doors has iron in it it rusts and so rust streaks start running down the sides in the front um they didn't understand expansion joints yet so they didn't build in expansion joints into the stone walls which means the temple built them in itself which these cracks that run between the windows we just keep them sealed up with a flexible sealer but in order to stay flexible to keep the moisture out it's also kind of tacky which means dust sticks to it so it looks like there's these horrific cracks in the walls and there are cracks in the walls but they look much worse than they really are those kinds of things need constant attention um it's it's a big job and getting bigger all the time at that time the guide that took us through was so proud of um he felt it was quite prophetic that when they went to put in the lights around the edges of that it was just seemed like it was prepared to receive those lights yeah i think there is inspiration but i i don't believe the inspiration was leave these spaces for no apparent reason so we could put in lights later or put in air conditioning later or you hear similar stories about the salt lake temple so we could put in elevators later i think the inspiration is let's put in vaulted ceilings which means we have these wonderful crawl spaces on either side of the vault which makes it much easier to retrofit for things like air conditioning and lights and et cetera well as the bishop in residence i will take your comments as suggesting that we all can help support some of that cost by going to the historic sites and making a contribution yeah that would be greatly appreciated so as of the 2021 budget we have been asked to be um self-sufficient meaning we need to raise as much income as we spend um and in a normal year we can do that or or get close between preservation fees and museum store sales and rental income and donations these are not normal years so i'm not sure what that's going to look like if if we can't open but yeah your your generous support would be greatly appreciated and very helpful do you read the tempo to third parties we do but it's a relatively nominal so we made the decision in the early 90s and have done it a little bit before that but that we would welcome others who who share this heritage to worship there as well so many of the groups that come our community of christ but we also welcome restorationist groups and members of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints and um i think we've had strang heights and vicar tonight's and others as well so we do welcome them i think it's it's like a hundred dollars per hour and then maybe two dollars per person or something it's not it's not really a money making venture although we might have to rethink that it really is simply to help offset some of the expenses what what does generate significant income now is our preservation fee which we've had to increase through the years um and we'll i think we're at ten dollars a person in 2020 before we close i think that's what we'll stay at in the scheme of things that's not not that much money if you go to westminster abbey i think it's like thirty or fifty dollars now um into tour museum homes in the us anyway it's not it's often 15 or 20 or more but having said that a lot of our visitors simply aren't used to paying anything to see church historic sites so it's a bit of a challenge but not bad most folks are happy to help you may have already mentioned um the the roof what is the material the roof is wood shingles and would have been early on at some point to try and save some money and maybe to try and make it more lightning proof we put slate on but we didn't consider how heavy slate is and how how under-engineered the roof structure was and so it it did not go particularly well and eventually we had to take the slate off and go back to wood lock what is the the best way to make a contribution is it to visit the kirtland temple website you can contribute through the kirtland temple website or through the community price historic sites foundation website um i'm trying to think though as canadians maybe our good bishop knows what's the best way um there's probably no good way to get a tax benefit is that right i was thinking that when and and and we should check into that and and we'll let people know wonderful well lock this has been great um we are at 3 30. do we have any any final comments or questions for locke it's been a privilege thank you thank you so much lock we really appreciate uh your knowledge and your wisdom and all your efforts to keep killing temple going very kind see everybody monday all right take care everyone bye thank you bye now see you later thank you

Channel: Community of Christ Canada East Mission

Views: 7,705

Keywords:

Id: qTUs1BHYk5A

Length: 90min 21sec (5421 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020