Trip to Nauvoo

Michael and the sunstone

On Saturday Michael and I went to Nauvoo for the day. We left our house a bit before 7:00 a.m. and got home around midnight -- it was a very full day! Nauvoo is about a three and a half hour drive from Chambana, so it's just about right for a day trip. (As a side note -- we stopped at a gas station on the way there to use the restrooms. Michael was waiting for the men's room and a friendly guy started a conversation with him. "You guys on a road trip?" "Yeah, we are." "You're pretty dressed up for a road trip." "Well . . . I guess you could say it's a religious pilgrimage." Can you imagine what Mr. Friendly must have thought? Two perfectly normal-looking kids on a Saturday morning -- and they're zealots!)

We went to the beautiful Nauvoo temple for an endowment session. It's such a remarkable building. The missionaries in our branch have both served in Nauvoo and they told us that if we asked some of the temple workers to show us, we could see some ceremonial temple clothing from the 1840s. A temple worker showed us those cases plus the baptistry in the basement of the temple and the spiral staircase that goes up six floors to the tower. It was beautiful.

We saw a lot of the historic sites in Old Nauvoo:

The Wilford Woodruff home, where all eight rooms have fireplaces!

The Scovil bakery, where we got to try some fresh gingerbread cookies,

The Brigham Young home (which is much smaller than his summer home in St. George, which we visited just a couple of months ago),

The printing office, where we saw archival copies of newspapers, The Times and Seasons and The Nauvoo Neighbor, and how they were printed in the 1840s,

The brickyard, where workers would produce four million bricks in a season -- between March and October (and we got our own little Nauvoo brick),

The Lucy Mack Smith home, where Joseph Smith's mother lived for a short time after the other Mormons left Nauvoo. Her arthritis was too bad to go in a wagon to the Salt Lake Valley.

The Sarah Melissa Granger Kimball home. Sarah Melissa Granger was an intelligent and wealthy woman who started inviting other women in Nauvoo to come to her home to sew shirts for the men who were working on the temple. She started a Ladies' Society that later became the Relief Society. Later, in Salt Lake City, Sarah was the first president of the Utah Suffrage Association and was instrumental in gaining women the right to vote. This was probably my favorite site that we visited. :) I'm looking for a good biography of Sarah Granger Kimball. Does anyone know of one?

We walked down Parley Street towards the Mississippi River, the same path that the Mormons took when they were leaving their beautiful city of Nauvoo. If they looked back, they would have seen their temple on the hill.

We felt very comfortable and at home in Nauvoo -- it felt sort of like Utah-minor with all of the missionaries and Mormon tourists. It was nice. We're visiting Utah-major this coming weekend for Robert and Sarah's wedding and we can hardly wait.