The Invasion of the Saints

The Mormons are rebuilding a holy temple to redeem their past. But will the town its in be erased?

by DAVID VAN BIEMA

There are two ways to view the large hole opposite city hall in Nauvoo, Ill. One way is Mayor Tom Wilson's; he gives it a glance each morning on his way to work. The other is from a nearby roof, where a camera transmits one photo every minute of the workday to a website run by a Utah company called Deseret Book. That's 540 exposures a day. Few go to waste. Since January the site has had 6 million hits, most by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Nothing is too minor or boring for the electronic audience. "To watch the pattern and progress of the concrete placement," the site recently instructed, "check the archive images from noon on May 19th, and continue throughout the afternoon." Some might call this obsessive. To the physical residents of Nauvoo it is, well, unnerving.

Hamlets all along the Mississippi are searching for a picturesque and salable past. But Nauvoo is the uneasy recipient of a double bounty: a town with two histories and two identities. In the mid-19th century the Mormons built a gleaming capital here, only to be bloodily expelled within seven years. The excavation symbolizes their return. From it will grow an exact, $25 million replica of the first great Mormon temple, torched by arsonists in 1848. Through it the Latter-day Saints will recover a key part of their past and achieve a kind of redemption. The irony is that in doing so, they may erase the identity of the community of 1,200 people that grew up in the interim. "We felt, hey, you're going to take away our quiet little town," says John McCarty, a Nauvoo city council member. "But the church never had a concept of that. They were just going to get their temple."

When Joseph Smith first arrived in Illinois in 1839, his people were in dire straits. Smith, who claimed to have received the Book of Mormon from the angel Moroni 12 years earlier, had attracted thousands of adherents, but they had been pushed out of one frontier town after another and ejected from Missouri under threat of death. Yet within three years the new town of Nauvoo boasted 1,500 log homes and shops and 350 brick buildings. Its militia counted 4,000 men, roughly half the size of the U.S. Army at the time. Its visual and spiritual centerpiece was to be a magnificent white limestone temple, with a 165-ft. steeple visible for miles.

But the Saints' neighbors grew nervous about a heavily armed theocracy in their midst. In 1844 Smith was jailed, then shot dead by a mob and his flock harrassed. In 1846, their temple barely completed, they reluctantly embarked on an extraordinary trek. It would produce another mighty settlement, near the Great Salt Lake. But Nauvoo, says Richard Ostling, co-author of the book Mormon America, quickly attained the status of a lost ideal: "the thorough expression of the Mormon kingdom of God on earth."

Over the next century, Nauvoo became a sleepy, almost entirely Roman Catholic river burg, whose hot events were weekly Fish Fridays and Chicken Wednesdays. Its working men labored in nearby Keokuk, Iowa, but their number shrank relentlessly as young people left. "By the time I moved here 10 years ago, it was pretty close to a retirement community," says Kathy Wallace, editor of the 500-circulation Nauvoo New Independent. At one point the only grocery closed for half a year for lack of business. When the Latter-day Saints, who had been trickling back for years, bought land in a historically Mormon part of town called the Flats and built a Mormonized Colonial Williamsburg called Nauvoo Restoration that drew 250,000 tourists a year, the income was welcome.

Not that there were no tensions. Mormon culture, for all its energy and sterling family values, can seem triumphal and even clannish to outsiders. Ken Millard, a Latter-day Saint who is also Nauvoo's city planner, admits that even after a century's exile, some Mormon tourists exhibited "an arrogance and ownership" regarding the town. Main Street merchants traded stories about shoppers who, arriving at the checkout, inquired, "Are you a Saint?" and if the answer was no, walked out, leaving the clerk holding the bag.

And then on Easter 1999, Gordon Hinckley, the Saints' president and prophet, announced that the church would rebuild the great Nauvoo Temple. Its agents were so confident that they applied for a building permit and scheduled groundbreaking for later the same month. The city council debate ran along monetary lines. The rebuilt temple would draw an estimated 1 million dollar-wielding visitors. But the pilgrims would strain the taxpayer-financed roads, sewers and police force, with its current night watch of one officer.

In the end, decency, pragmatism and fear of litigation triumphed. Says Jane Langford, the New Independent's owner: "It goes against the grain here to prevent people from using their own land." Plus, it's hard to stop them. Unlike locales that have contested the Mormons' current wave of temple building (a dispute in Belmont, Mass., seems destined for the Supreme Court), Nauvoo had no zoning laws and no desire to lock legal horns with an opponent worth some $30 billion. When the Mormons anted up $471,000 for town expenses, they got their permit. Most of the townspeople, says Wallace, "were proud of the council for getting some money out of it."

They have only gradually begun to realize the implications of the deal. Mormons now own an estimated 32% of the town land. An extension of Brigham Young University sits where there had been a Catholic boarding school. Houses in the Flats once worth $20,000 now go for $250,000, and tax assessments have risen accordingly‹longtime residents have every incentive to sell and leave. Meanwhile, temples like Nauvoo's serve as magnets for Mormon retirees, who take up spiritual tasks such as baptizing deceased ancestors of believers. It will take just 900 such immigrants to effect a Mormon majority in the town. Says Langford, the publisher, grimly: "They want to take back Nauvoo, and since they can't do it with guns, they are doing it with money." If so, in the first of what would no doubt be many social changes, Nauvoo would probably go dry. E-mails Sonja Bush: "I own the Draft House in Nauvoo, and was informed tonight that the city planner (Mormon) referred to it as Œa place of sin.' Boy! You should have seen it. Wednesday is ŒChicken Nite' and a lot of our sinners were in their 60s to mid-80s. They were kicking up their heels and having a sinful good time!"

It is hard to imagine Millard, the Mormon planner, uttering "place of sin." A worried-looking, bespectacled man provided to the town by the church as part of the temple deal, he is careful to use the word we in discussing the town's future. "We don't want to see change in Nauvoo," he says, "yet there's no way you can stop [it]." This, in a country where change is the secular religion, is an almost unanswerable argument. But Millard gives it the inimitable Mormon spin. "The church believes in unity and harmony, and the official position is to work things out," he says. "But when there's a goal to accomplish, they like it to be accomplished." — Reported by Julie Grace/Nauvoo