2004—5 July: Montrose
0317MainStMontrose
The day after Keokuk’s Glorious Fourth, Hepzibah and I hied ourselves 12 miles to the north, to the edge of Montrose, where its Main Street intersects its city limit. Looking straight east, down a mile and a half of Main Street, one sees the Nauvoo Temple, framed in the trees at the end of the street. Not an accident, if the story I heard is for real.
The way I heard it, one day in 1843, Joseph Smith instructed Isaac Galland, a recent convert and rather a colorful character, to load surveying instruments into a skiff and to row across from Nauvoo to Montrose. There, he was to lay out straight streets, north-south and east-west, spaced just like the ones in Nauvoo and aligned with them. He was to designate a temple block in Montrose (which Joseph called Zarahemla) so that the temple to be built there and the Nauvoo Temple would stand astride the Mississippi like bookends. 0313NauvooFromMontrose
The Nauvoo Temple, across the Mississippi,
viewed from the eastern end of Main Street, Montrose
Since the 1860s, when the elements and other enemies finished destroying the original Nauvoo Temple, you could no longer perceive Galland’s alignment. But now that a new Nauvoo Temple stands in the same spot as the old one occupied, we can come out here and get the perspective.
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