On the 170th anniversary of the Saints entering the Salt Lake Valley, a longtime question has now been answered. How long after Mormon pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley was land surveyed and designated as the official location of Temple Square? A week? A month? According to a recently discovered journal belonging to pioneer surveyor Jesse Carter Little, the location of Temple Square was known the day pioneers entered the valley, July 24, 1847.

The Church Office Building in Temple Square. Courtesy of the LDS Media Library.

In April, Rob Thurston of Provo, Utah, age 60, made an amazing discovery about his great-great-grandfather, Jesse Carter Little. He found his ancestor’s journal containing entries made along the journey west to the Salt Lake Valley. But the journey to acquiring the journal was an adventure in and of itself.

“When I was a young boy about age 7, I used to go down to Manti, Utah, to where my grandmother lived,” Thurston said. “In her old house I used to like to play hide-and-seek and hide under the stairs.”

In the small confines of the room under the stairs, Thurston remembers seeing an old cream-colored box filled with aged letters and photographs. At the time, the letters were of particular interest because of the stamps that could be cut out and added to his stamp collection.

It wasn’t until this past April that memories of the cream-colored box came flooding back in Thurston’s mind. “I asked my mother whatever happened to the box,” he said. “She wasn’t exactly sure but recalled that it was given to a BYU professor to take a look at. The professor was contemplating writing an article about the items in it and also indicated he would see if they held any worth.”

The only problem with the box was it was given to the BYU professor, who Thurston declined to name, in 1977, 40 years ago. “I thought, ‘That’s it, they’re gone,’” Thurston said. “And to top it all off, my mother could not remember the name of the BYU professor.”

After a lot of hard work, Thurston found out the name of the professor, who, fortunately, was still working at Brigham Young University. He called the professor and mentioned the cream-colored box. Sure enough, the professor still had the box and remembered his mother. Thurston made an appointment to see him.

At the office of the BYU professor, Thurston recovered the box. It had been on a shelf for many years. “I remember what the professor told me,” said Thurston. “’There really isn’t anything in there. I didn’t see anything of value. Go ahead and take it.’”

Thurston took the box home and opened it. It held more than 180 items.

“Not knowing exactly what I had, I took the box to a document expert to help me understand. I was told that there were a number of significant things.”

The box contained a treasure trove of journals, letters and photographs from Thurston’s ancestors. “It gave depth to my ancestors I knew nothing about,” he said.

“There was a letter from Brigham Young I was excited about and a bunch of letters from an ancestor named Jesse Carter Little. He was the one ancestor I knew. He helped found the Mormon Battalion, and he met with President James K. Polk to get funds to help the Saints come west.”

The pinnacle of the discovery was an 1846 journal kept by Jesse Carter Little from the first pioneer company coming across the plains with Brigham Young. It contained tons of detailed information about the company’s trek west. “He recorded how many miles they went, where they reached, location names and coordinates for longitude and latitude with a sextant and compass,” Thurston said.

The most interesting entry was the one dated July 24, 1847. Little was in the advance party that entered the valley, and he recorded the following on two lines in his journal. Line one reads: “Salt Lake Valley 114 miles from Fort Bridger.” The second line reads: “Northern boundary of the Temple Square 40 degrees latitude and 111 degrees longitude.”

To check the accuracy of Little’s journal, the distance from the address of Fort Bridger to the address of Temple Square was calculated using Google Maps. It yielded 118 miles versus the journal’s 114. Plugging the longitude and latitude coordinates from Little’s journal into the U.S. government’s NASA website latitude/longitude finder yields the location of Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah.

“For the last 85 years these treasured items were either under the stairwell of an old house or in the office of a BYU professor. Finding these items was important. In my family, we are calling this the miracle of the cream-colored shirt box.”

Walking to General Conference in Temple Square. Courtesy of the LDS Media Library.

Ryan Morgenegg is a writer for Deseret News.

Ashley Morales

Frequently whimsical and overly optimistic about how much time it will take to do things, Ashley Morales is deeply passionate about the gospel and all kinds of creativity. Her hobbies include philosophically analyzing nearly every book, play, video game, and movie that she consumes, writing music and short stories, promising herself that she will finish writing her novels, going to sleep too late, eating foods she’s never tried, putting off cleaning her house, browsing Zillow, spending as much quality time as possible with her wonderful husband, trying to be a good mother to her fantastic children, and never finding the balance between saying too much and too little. One day, she hopes to leave a positive mark on the world and visit every continent (except Antarctica) with her family.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized on April 6, 1830, in New York. At this organization, the Lord revealed to Joseph Smith a commandment that the Saints should keep a record of the history of the Church (Doctrine and Covenants 21:1). Later it became a position in the Church—Church Historian—to be in charge of the record kept. This commandment applies individually as well. Church members are encouraged to keep personal journals of their lives and of the Lord’s hand in their lives.

New Church History Library

Today the Church Historian and Recorder is Elder Steven Snow of the Seventy, who replaced Marlin Jensen as historian in 2012.

Marlin Jensen, when he was originally called to serve as historian in 2005, seemed an unlikely choice because of his lack of experience in the field. However, he threw himself into the task and accomplished significant things, including overseeing the groundbreaking for the Joseph Smith Papers Project (an initiative to research, collect, and publish all manuscripts and documents created by or under the direction of the Prophet Joseph Smith, which will take several years to complete), putting thousands of the Church’s documents online, reorganizing the staff and moving them into a new, state-of-the-art building (see below), and insisting on an open and honest account being laid forth of the controversial Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Jensen said of the importance of keeping records, “The primary purpose of Church history is to help Church members build faith in Jesus Christ and keep their sacred covenants” (“Giving the Past a Future,” Ensign, October 2009, 42). The Church recently completed a new facility in which to store all these records. The new Church History Library was dedicated in June 2009 and is located in downtown Salt Lake City, just to the east of the Conference Center. The close location to both the Family History Library and to the Church History Museum gives patrons easy access to countless documents.

“Marlin Jensen has done more to further the cause of Mormon history than any person of the current generation,” said Terryl Givens, an LDS writer and professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond in Virginia. “He will be missed as much for the quality of his character as for his contributions. His unflinching honesty and his confidence that church history needed no whitewashing or sanitizing set the tone for a whole new generation of LDS academics” (“Changing of the Guard in Mormon History,” Peggy Fletcher Stack, Salt Lake Tribune, January 19, 2012).

The standard for accuracy in Church history has not decreased since Elder Snow’s call. Assistant Church Historian Richard E. Turley, Jr., received the prestigious 2013 Herbert Feis Award from the American Historical Association, recognizing his significant contributions in guiding the Church’s history operations which include archives, museums, 25 historic sites, and an almost unparalleled records management system.

During Turley’s time as a leader the Church History Department, the department developed and continued to exact high-level standards focusing on the acquisition, organization, preservation, and dissemination of materials relating to the founding and development of the Church. No matter who is currently in charge of the Church History Department, the task is huge.

Leaders of the Church have long recognized that the history of the Church involves much more than just dates and names, but rather encompasses the history of all its people. Members from all around the world, from the time of the First Vision in 1820 to the present, have had faith-building, spiritual experiences which have contributed to the building of the kingdom of God on the earth. People have made sacrifices, have made covenants, and have been richly blessed, knowing their stories can strengthen the faith of Church members today.

The Church History Library provides nearly 25 miles of shelving to store all kinds of records: books, journals, photographs, microfilm, other media, and miscellaneous documents. The library’s old facilities in the Church Office Building were inadequate in size and scope. Now the library has the proper facilities to provide adequate temperature, humidity, and air-quality control to precious documents, plus fire and seismic protection.

New Church History Library Lobby

It is not only the goal of library staff to collect and store important Church documents, but to provide these documents to researchers, who might be professionals or amateurs. Archivists don’t want to simply preserve this information; they want people to use this information. Patrick Dunshee, manager of marketing and communications for the Church History Department explains, “Our desire is to help patrons increase their faith as they connect to their past” (“Giving the Past a Future,” Ensign, October 2009, 20). Family history can be conducted here which can bring new life and meaning by looking at personal records and pictures. When records were moved to the new building, every item was given a bar code and was scanned, thus enabling much more efficient and effective research and maintenance. Though not everything is open to public access, due to considerations such as privacy, confidentiality, and copyright laws, patrons are given access to the library catalogs and indexes. With 125 employees and nearly 200 full-time and Church-service missionaries, ample research help is also available. The library will also be offering myriad programs to teach people more about the resources available.

Sources:

Changing of the guard in Mormon history

Church Historian Receives Prestigious History Award

Assistant Church Historian Honored by National Group

President Henry B. Eyring shares his experiences of keeping a daily journal:

dwhite

Doris White is a native of Oregon and graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in English and a minor in Editing. She loves to talk with others about the gospel of Jesus Christ.