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Nauvoo: a Pattern for Building the City of God

Lush greenery surrounding the lovely home of Heber C. Kimball in Nauvoo, Hancock County, Illinois. This once swampy, mosquito-infested land was purchased by the Saints with long-term financing and low interest rates. The Prophet Joseph instilled a vision in the people to turn this poor land into the largest city in the state of Illinois.

Missouri wanted the Mormons out, and with key leaders of the Church imprisoned, responsibility for the exodus fell to Brigham Young. On January 26, 1839, Brigham created the Committee on Removal, whose job through the winter and spring was to feed, clothe, and transport the poor. By mid-February, a temporary break in the weather allowed the large-scale migration to begin. Saints, some with oxen teams, made several trips between Caldwell County and the Mississippi River to carry friends out of danger. Several families crowded into a single wagon.

Lands and precious possessions left behind were sold at a pitiful rate, as low as fifty cents an acre. One Saint sold his forty acres for a "blind mare and a clock."

Arrival at the Mississippi was no guarantee of comfort either. Lucy Mack Smith said: "The snow was now six inches deep and still falling. We made our beds upon it and went to rest with what comfort we might under such circumstances. The next morning our beds were covered with snow and much of the bedding under which we lay was frozen. We rose and tried to light a fire, but, finding it impossible, we resigned ourselves to our comfortless situation."

Emma Smith traveled with her four children; she carried two cotton bags under her skirt, containing Joseph's priceless translation of the Bible. When she arrived at the frozen Mississippi, she got out, and, with her children clinging to her, she walked across the river.

The residents of Quincy, Illinois, extended kindness and sympathy to the bedraggled refugees, collecting food for them and offering shelter, but as the thousands of Saints arrived at the banks of the Mississippi, living conditions deteriorated and people slept in the open, in tents, and in shanties.

The question now was what they were to do next. Where were they to go? A land speculator, Isaac Galland, hearing of the plight of the Saints, offered to sell the Church large tracts of land in Iowa and Illinois with long-term financing. Sidney Rigdon thought the Saints ought to scatter as their gathering had been the source of so much hostility, but word came from Joseph at the Liberty jail that they were to build a city again.

The eastern shore of the frozen Mississippi River at Quincy, Illinois. At this site, hundreds of Saints spent the bitter winter of 1839. Joseph had been imprisoned at Liberty, Clay County, Missouri, and the scattered Saints looked for refuge here at this town of 1,800 inhabitants. Quincy residents showed kindness to the Saints and looked upon their grave conditions with a degree of charity.