Content preview - You need a premium account to view this content.

The City of Zion Plat

Richard H. Jackson

One of the distinctive characteristics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is its emphasis on community. At a time when American farmers were creating individual farmsteads across the midwest, Joseph Smith taught that farmers needed to live in organized towns where "the farmer and his family . . . will enjoy all the advantages of schools, public lectures, and other meetings. His home will no longer be isolated, and his family denied the benefits of society" (Jackson, 230). Only three years after the Church was organized, the Prophet proposed a plan, known as the City of Zion Plat, for a community that could be replicated anywhere the Saints settled.

The City of Zion Plat, sent to Church leaders in Missouri on June 25, 1833, shows a town laid out in a regular grid pattern with north-south orientation. All of the blocks are square, with unusually wide (132-foot) streets. Such broad thoroughfares would minimize congestion, enhance safety, and allow even the largest wagons to turn easily. Blocks were divided into 20 large (one-half-acre) lots to allow for gardens in the back and shrubs and trees in front, with one house to a lot, set back 25 feet from the street. Their orientation was varied so that houses faced alternate streets on each block. Each lot was to have only one house constructed on it, and all houses were to be constructed of brick or stone. The plat required that all farms, barns, and livestock be located outside the city. The plat showed a central tier of larger blocks with 32 lots per block; the two central blocks in this tier were to be used for temples and public buildings.

The marginal notes on the City of Zion Plat indicated that it was designed to accommodate 15,000 to 20,000 people. When this size was reached, a new town was to be established far enough away to allow for enough farmland to support the residents of the new town. It is unclear whether the Prophet expected that each Mormon community would follow the City of Zion Plat. The Plat was never referred to as a Revelation, which would have given it the status of a commandment to the Saints. No community founded by Mormons ever followed it precisely.