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Emergence of Mormonism on the American Landscape (1950-1965)

Jan Shipps

For more than a century after the settlement of the Great Salt Lake Valley (1847), the great majority of Latter-day Saints lived in "Zion in the tops of the mountains," an area extending outward from Temple Square across all of the state of Utah, northward to Idaho and Wyoming, southward to Arizona, westward to Nevada, and eastward to Colorado. Known to geographers, historians, and other social scientists as the Mormon culture region, to the Saints the Intermountain West has always been Mormonism's center place; the remainder of the world, including the rest of the United States, was the mission field.

While nearly 20 percent of the membership of the LDS Church lived outside Zion as early as 1930, references to the Saints in both textbooks and the popular press continued for decades to picture Mormonism as a regional phenomenon, a faith community situated in the Intermountain West. This is not as surprising as one might think: with the exception of California and a few large metropolitan areas, branches of local Mormons outside the Intermountain West were nearly all associated with the geographical headquarters of regional LDS missions, which, for the most part, were housed in Victorian mansions or other substantial dwellings in residential areas. Although identified by signs as LDS mission headquarters, these structures did not resemble churches; therefore, they did not advertise the existence of local Mormon congregations. Moreover, despite the fact that a number of LDS ward houses had been built in southern California and in other Pacific states before 1941 and despite several substantial meetinghouses located in the larger urban areas of the nation, these buildings likewise failed to advertise the presence of LDS congregations effectively since they were not peculiarly Mormon from an architectural standpoint.

But this changed dramatically between 1945 and 1965 as LDS members from the Intermountain West, most of whom belonged to the Church's lay priesthood, settled with their families in many different areas of the United States. Joining branches of longtime Mountain Saints and the rapidly expanding cadre of LDS converts who had never gathered to Zion, these Utah Mormons provided the lay leadership critical to the organization of LDS stakes and wards all across the country. The formation of these basic congregational units of the Church called for the building of meetinghouses on an unprecedented scale.