Word: mormons
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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...
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...
...Smith was jailed, then shot dead by a mob and his flock harassed. 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...
...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...
...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...