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The Logan Tabernacle and Temple
The Logan Tabernacle and Temple
BY LEONARD J. ARRINGTON AND MELVIN A. LARKIN
THE DOMINANT MOTIF OF PIONEER Mormonism was the yearning to build the Kingdom of God, to build a latter-day Zion. Everything was the church—the group—the society—what might be called "corporate Mormonism." There was none of the existentialist philosophy which glorifies the individual person, his feelings, his hopes and fears, his strivings and achievements.
As one studies each community of Latter-day Saints, he gets the impression that the community was always in the process of building or creating some symbolic expression of its corporateness—its Zionic character—its communitarian single-mindedness. Sometimes these cooperatively produced creations were tangible, as in the case of buildings. Others were organizations, attitudes, legends, and folklore. If we follow the history of each community, we find it going through several clearly defined stages.
The first stage in the life of a Mormon community was the cooperative laboring on three structures: a short diversion canal to provide water for homes, crops, and livestock; the community fort, which was an orchestration of log cabins or dugouts built as if each was part of one great, centrally planned residence; and a makeshift "meetinghouse" for community worship and recreation. At first the latter was a willow bowery which served in good weather. It was followed by a social hall, usually built of logs and with a dirt floor, which was the scene of community dances during the week and of preaching services on Sunday. Here were held the priesthood meetings, the relief societies, and young people's debate clubs.
The second stage in community life, occurring within two or three years after the community was founded, included the construction of longer diversion canals, adobe homes a little larger in size, and a tabernacle—an undertaking of such size and expense that only one was built for each nucleated group of settlements. The third stage saw the completion of high line canals, rock and frame homes, and a temple—a mammoth enterprise that required many years—a symbol of the unity of an entire region in the construction of a common project which was entirely spiritual in its purpose.
Logan—Cache Valley—went through all of these stages in a period of one generation, less than thirty years. Founded in 1859, Logan and other settlements in Cache Valley built short canals, forts, and social halls during the years 1859-62. The population continued to grow, particularly in Logan, and it became obvious that a larger structure for worship and instruction was necessary. Apostle Ezra T. Benson and associates held a meeting of the Saints on December 7, 1864 (five years after Logan was founded), to discuss a proposal to build a tabernacle. At this meeting, 175 persons subscribed a total of $26,450. All of these pledges were "in kind;" that is, in labor, team labor, timber, produce, and other supplies. Befitting his status as resident apostle in the valley, Elder Benson led the list of subscribers with a proffered donation of $1,200. Work on the tabernacle, located on the eight-acre central block of the town, began almost immediately. The diary of Ralph Smith shows him, on January 1, 1865, out with his brethren cutting timber and slide logs for the tabernacle. "A vast amount were got," he added. This work went on regularly during the cold month of January. For example, Henry Ballard recorded on January 9, 1865, that he was sliding logs for the tabernacle. He indicates in that entry that the structure was to be 60 feet by 106 feet and that it was to be built of rock. From other sources we learn that excavation for the basement and the construction of a cobblestone foundation were accomplished during the winter of 1864-65. And then the work was suspended until they put in crops. Why so little was done on the project during the ensuing seven winters is difficult to ascertain. Probably wards were building their own meetinghouses. Bishop William B. Preston was absent on missionary work, Apostle Benson died unexpectedly in 1869, and the presiding bishop of Cache Valley, Peter Maughan, died early in 1871.
In 1873 Brigham Young visited Logan, reviewed the construction project, and saw that much rock had been hauled for the tabernacle. Noting the continuous increase in population, due primarily to immigration and the construction of new canals, he suggested that they tear out the old cobblestone foundation, enlarge it to 65 feet by 130 feet, and resume building immediately. During that year the Saints also completed, on a cooperative basis, the Utah Northern Railroad, which went from Ogden, through Cache Valley, to Franklin, Idaho. When that was completed, in May 1874, several dozen individuals were put to work quarrying sandstone in Franklin and shipping it on the railroad to Logan, where it was carried to Tabernacle Square and dressed and used to lay up for walls. This process of rock and timber work continued throughout 1874, 1875, and 1876. On January 27, 1877, the basement story was dedicated, and later the main structure was completed. By August 1878 the upper story was opened, and quarterly conference was held there. Later the entrance and tower were built under the direction of George Cole, and the completed tabernacle, substantially as it appears now, was dedicated by President Wilford Woodruff in November 1891.
In the meantime, Brigham Young announced in 1876 the organization of three temple districts to construct temples in Utah: one in northern Utah and southern Idaho, one in the Great Salt Lake region, and a third in central Utah. The first was to build a temple in Logan, the second to complete the temple in Salt Lake City, and a third to build a temple in Manti. Charles O. Card, who had been superintendent of construction on the Logan Tabernacle, was appointed to be superintendent of construction of the Logan Temple, and a number of those who had been more or less regularly employed on the tabernacle were then placed at work on the temple. The site for the temple was chosen in May 1877 when dedication and ground-breaking ceremonies were held. The materials were to be obtained from the valley and its adjoining canyons.
The temple was to be 171 feet long, 95 feet wide, 86 feet high to the square, with towers 165 feet and 170 feet, respectively. The structure enclosed forty-five rooms in its five stories. It was seven years in building and was completed in May 1884.
In anticipation of the announcement to build the temple, local authorities canvassed Logan in 1877 and at the end of one month received pledges of $37,000, of which $2,200 was in cash, $1,600 in merchandise, $8,200 in produce, and $25,000 in labor. This was, of course, while the tabernacle was still being built. Apparently this did not discourage them from building the temple which cost local residents about $70,000 a year for the seven years.
At the dedication of the temple site on May 18, Brigham Young had said:
Committees were appointed for each stake, ward, and settlement to make sure that sufficient men were maintained at all times at each place of work.
For the purpose of constructing the temple, six temple industries were founded:
1. A sawmill was established in Temple Fork (Maughan's Fork) in Logan Canyon. Here they cut red pine (Douglas fir).
2. A wood camp was set up a few miles down the canyon. This provided firewood for the lime kilns and scaffolding for workmen, railroad ties for sale, and telegraph poles for their cooperative Deseret Telegraph Company.
3. A lime kiln was built in the mouth of the canyon. The firewood to provide fuel was floated downstream on the Logan River.
4. The main stone quarry was developed in Green Canyon, east of North Logan. Here they quarried the dark fucoid quartzite which is the main component of the exterior walls.
5. Another quarry in Hyde Park Canyon provided additional stone for the walls.
6. A third quarry northeast of Franklin supplied sandstone for the water tables, caps, and window ledges.
As with the other cooperative community enterprises which preceded it—the canal system, the fort, the bowery, the Logan Social Hall, and the tabernacle—the temple on a grander scale was intermingled and entwined with the whole life of the community. Indeed, one can hardly distinguish the building of the tabernacle and the temple from the general building of the community. The network of temple industries not only supplied the temple itself but provided materials for the construction of homes, barns, and shops. Many of the temple employees received their pay in building materials produced by these industries which they used in erecting their own homes and business structures. For example, the temple sawmill produced more than 2.5 million board feet of lumber of which more than 1.5 million board feet went to construction other than the temple. Large quantities of shingles and lath were also sold. Many railroad cars of lumber were sent to Salt Lake City to be used in the temple there and in the Assembly Hall. In hauling this lumber from the sawmill to Logan a way was provided for Logan citizens to obtain lumber for themselves: hundreds of individuals carted lumber from the mill to temple block and took home as pay some of the lumber they hauled. The temple lime kiln produced 52,000 bushels of lime of which all but 18,000 bushels found its way into the local market. Some of its was shipped as far north as Blackfoot, Idaho.
Rock quarried for the temple was also used for other projects. Five hundred tons from Green Canyon were used in building the first structure of Brigham Young College. Sandstone from Franklin was used in the Smithfield tabernacle. Other granite rock from Franklin was sold to James H. Brown and Sons who made gravestones and monuments for the valley. Many may be found today in the Logan cemetery.
Many of those who labored on the temple used this means of working out the accounts they owed to the Perpetual Emigrating Fund which had assisted them in coming from Europe. Others among the large force of volunteers helped raise funds for the temple by contracting for other construction projects and devoting part of the proceeds to the temple. For example, one group built the Cache County Courthouse, another built the Fifth Ward School House, another constructed the Logan Water Reservoir, still others built small structures: barns, walls, culverts, coffins, etc. In essence the whole community was built as part of the process of building the temple—like the Chartres Cathedral that Henry Adams described so unforgettably. There were beef cattle drives to raise cash. Other ventures included a hundredacre farm in Mendon, railroad contracts of the Utah Northern Railroad extension in Idaho, contracts for the Great Northern Railroad in the Pacific Northwest, and contracts for the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad in 1883. The latter led to a "Cache Valley" settlement in Canada in the late 1880s, and the Cardston Mormon colony became a part of Cache Valley Stake.
The ledger book of the Logan Temple shows contributions of quilts, eggs, honey, books, shoes, garden sheds, vegetables, grains, meat, livestock, clothing, a threshing machine, a covered carriage, and even a Mason and Hamblin organ. Everything was accepted. Charles O. Card wrote to one person: "We shall be pleased to accept some fat sheep or anything else we can use, if it is the hide of a yellow dog, we can use that for many purposes."
When they were near to completing the temple, and in debt, a drive was held in Salt Lake City wards in December 1883, the first held outside of Cache Valley. A Salt Lake correspondent of the Utah Journal reported:
There were contributions from England, Switzerland, and New Zealand, as well as from other places in the United States. All told, the contributions to Logan Temple construction were $607,000, consisting of the following categories:
$30,000 in merchandise (5 percent) 30,000 in livestock (5 percent) 71,000 in produce (12 percent) 93,000 in cash (15 percent) 380,000 in labor (63 percent) 3,000 in wagons and teams 61 percent from temple district ($372,000) 36 percent from trustee-in-trust ($215,000) 3 percent from outside temple district ($21,000)
This was at a time when the labor of a person was valued at about $1.50 per man per day. About one hundred and fifty men and fifty teams were at work constantly on the temple and at the temple industries during the seven years of construction.
How well they built is suggested by the fact that when some new construction was authorized recently, sixty sticks of dynamite failed to blow out a small piece of masonry construction. It took two men with a jackhammer, working ten hours per day, a whole week to cut a doorway through one of the outside temple walls, sixteen feet thick. The floor of the temple was carpeted by 3,600 yards of carpeting of which sixty percent was handmade by women in the Logan Temple district.
Construction of the temple served to develop skills of local workmen: upon the completion of the temple, the laborers began work on buildings of the Agricultural College of Utah and Brigham Young College in Logan. Among structures built at the Agriculture College (now Utah State University) soon after the completion of the temple were Old Main, the Forestry Building (originally a dormitory), and the Extension Building (now Information Services). These buildings utilized the same type of rock masonry as the temple. The Bear Lake Stake Tabernacle at Paris was similarly built after the completion of the temple with the same labor.
Truman O. Angell was architect of the temple, and while he was directing its construction in Logan he used his skill to design other Cache Valley buildings: the Fifth Ward School in Logan, the Hyrum two-story rock school, the Cache County Courthouse, and the Logan City Fire Department. He also contributed his artistic talent by leading the Logan Amateur Brass Band.
In essence, the temple project was a means of redistributing income. Those of greater property and income supported craftsmen and laborers to work on the temple during the seven years of construction. Since the materials were nearly all supplied locally, the money, labor, and materials were not lost to the community. Very little was expended outside the valley. In essence, those able to furnish resources did so, and the community economy thus was enriched. In most frontier economies, surplus resources were used to build large homes for the wealthy. In Cache Valley, such large homes were products of the twentieth century when there were not projects as effective as the tabernacle and temple in utilizing surplus for the benefit of the entire community.
The project gave Cache Valleyans pride in their valley, a pride which expressed itself in many ways. In August 1883, for example, just before teh temple was dedicated, Logan invited the firemen of Salt Lake City and their wives and families to go to Logan to see the nearly completed temple. Approximately seven hundred persons went to Logan. As they arrived, they were greeted by the Logan Firemen's Brass Band, which ascended to the roof of the temple and played a concert which in the words of the Logan Journal "caused beautiful strains of music to float down over the city."
Architecturally, there is more than a suggestion of military gothicism in the Logan Temple. Some visitors have compared it to a castle on the Loire. Phil Robinson, who visited it just about the time of completion in the 1880s, wrote: "The walls are of such prodigious thickness, and the windows so narrow and comparatively small, that the buildings [Robinson is speaking of the Salt Lake and Manti Temples as well] seem to be constructed for defence rather than for worship. But once within, the architecture proves itself admirable. The windows gave abundant light and the loftiness of the room imparts an airiness that is as surprising as pleasing." Dale Morgan, writing in Utah: A Guide to the State, declares: "The temple at Logan . . . has from the darkness of its stone and its octagonal corner towers the gloomy aspect of a Norman castle." On his tour of the West in 1938 Thomas Wolfe had written of the Salt Lake Temple: "The harsh ugly temple, the temple sacrosanct, by us unvisited, unvisitable, so ugly, grim, grotesque, and blah—so curiously warped, grotesque, somehow so cruelly formidable . . . enough, enough, of all this folly, this cruelty and this superstition."
By the time he had reached Cache Valley, however, Wolfe was overwhelmed by the physical evidence of what the Mormons could do. In fact, he was almost ecstatic. He recorded a "sense of grandeur, sweetness and familiarity . . . cupped in the rim of bold hills, a magic valley plain, flat as a floor and green as heaven and more fertile and more ripe than the Promised land . . . the most lovely and enchanted valley of them all ... a valley that makes all that has gone before fade to nothing—the very core and fruit of Canaan—a vast sweet plain of unimaginable riches—loaded with fruit, lusty with cherry orchards, green with its thick and lush fertility and dotted everywhere with the beauty of incredible trees ... a land of peace and promises of plenty."
The overwhelming majority of Latter-day Saints will not accept Wolfe's image of the grim and ugly Salt Lake Temple, nor Dale Morgan's Norman castle. To Latter-day Saints, both temples are beautiful, whether in the evening when they are resplendently illuminated, or in the daytime, mirrored against the blue skies. Latter-day Saints see the grandeur and magnificence, the massiveness and durability of the architectural design, as stemming from the desire of the pioneers for a sanctuary, a refuge, a haven, a place where they could engage in undisturbed reverie, a doorway to heaven, a spiritual fortress where they could not be cuffed about and mauled, where they would not quake in constant fear of their homes being burned and their leaders imprisoned and assassinated. Robert Sloan understood this feeling, referring to the Logan Temple as "an eternal sentinel to watch the peaceful habitations of men at its feet."
The Logan Temple was dedicated after the Edmunds Act was passed (1882) and at a time when some of the provisions of the Edmunds-Tucker Act were being considered. These acts sought to eliminate the Mormon church as a temporal power in the West, and the key provision directed the attorney general to institute proceedings to take over all properties of the Mormon church. Presumably this "takeover" would include temples. To avoid the latter possibility, President Taylor's dedicatory prayer gave emphasis to study and to the need to become acquainted with good books, languages, governments, and laws. One portion of the prayer reads:
Shortly after the dedication President Taylor wrote the northern Utah Saints, reminded them of the references in the prayer to education, mentioned the precedent in the Kirtland (Ohio) Temple where a temple school was established, and asked the people to organize themselves "to make it a house of learning as it also is a house of God." Under his direction wards and stakes held meetings and elected delegates to go to Logan where they formed the Logan Temple Association, a legal non-profit association. Officers were elected and articles of incorporation signed by seventy-four delegates; then President Taylor signed over the temple and grounds to this association, in whose hands it remained until 1912. Under President Taylor's direction the association founded the Logan Temple School of Science which included departments of theology, astronomy, mathematics, history, languages, laws, and natural science. (This was after Brigham Young College was established but before Utah State Agricultural College was founded). A library of about five hundred books was collected; these are still in the Logan Temple reading room. The following heads of departments were elected:
Classes were held from 1885 to 1900, with something like one hundred fifty students each season. The student was charged no tuition but had to carry a recommend from his bishop indicating his loyalty and worthiness. Lectures one hour in length were given at two thirty in the afternoon on the first Saturday of each month, after which a discussion ensued. Many of the lectures were later published in the Contributor, Deseret News, and as separate books by the Utah Journal Publishing Company.
The Mormons had always made a great deal of the security of the mountains. The mountains were a protection, a shield. Like the covenant people of ancient Israel whom they consciously imitated, they had fled from Babylon to inherit the chambers of the Rockies to build a kingdom in the tops of the mountains. Brigham Young wrote to Colonel Thomas L. Kane on May 9, 1852:
For the Mormons the mountains were sources of water and timber, of wild game, of granite for their temple, of protection and nourishment. Their settled valleys were isolated by lofty and majestic peaks. To quote Brigham Young again:
More specifically, Brigham Young said to the Saints in Wellsville:
The temple was a kind of private mountain—a corporeal embodiment of their ideals—a formidable defender of the Saints' way of life, symbolically guarding the church from the threats of the larger society around them. It was also a symbol of their reaching out to God—of their closeness to God—a place to which the Savior would come to dwell with them. In many respects the temple came to be regarded almost in a mystical sense. In actuality, it was a more explicit formulation of the rugged and majestic mountains around them—a man-made sentinel, guarding their Promised Valley.
Today the Logan Temple can be seen from almost every part of the valley. It symbolically demonstrates the early settlers' belief that life is more than a struggle for physical survival. To the twenty-five thousand persons who built it and labored on it "without purse or scrip," it was a visual reminder of the omnipresence of eternity.
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