St. George and Washington County in southwestern Utah should rank high on that list of important places to study the history of the LDS Church.
After all, the first fully operational Mormon temple opened in St. George and was dedicated in 1877. The Salt Lake Temple was not completed until 1893.
Visitors to St. George and the surrounding area can visit the St. George Temple Visitors' Center, Brigham Young's Winter Home, the St. George Tabernacle, the Jacob Hamblin Home in Santa Clara, the Pine Valley Chapel - about a 40-minute drive from St. George - and the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in a single day.
All these sites offer free admission. LDS missionaries take visitors on informative guided tours at the three St. George sites as well as at the Jacob Hamblin Home.
Visitors come away with all sorts of nuggets of Mormon history, including what leader Brigham Young envisioned for St. George when he came to visit the 309 families who settled the city to see if they could grow cotton in the 1860s.
Young offered this prophecy when he visited in the spring of 1861:
"There will yet be built between these volcanic ridges a city with spires and towers and steeples, with homes containing many inhabitants."
Other Mormon leaders who endured flash floods, scorching summer heat and more than a few hardships might have agreed more with J. Golden Kimball, another famous Mormon leader and humorist.
"I don't know how the people of St. George can stand the heat, the Indians, the snakes and the flooding Virgin River," Kimball once said. "If I had a house in St. George and a house in hell, I'd rent out the one in St. George and move straight to hell."
The hardships and hard work the first Washington County settlers endured to settle an area that is now one of the fastest-growing urban centers in the United States left a lasting impression on Karl Wrigley, a Provo resident now serving a mission in St. George.
Part of Wrigley's job is to update the history and tour presentations at each of the Washington County sites.
"More than anything else, what impresses me is what people had to go through," he said while sitting in the balcony of the beautiful St. George Tabernacle. "It was difficult. These people had come from the East to Salt Lake City, where they had made a livelihood and built homes, only to be requested by their leader to give it all up and move to this desolate place. These days, we'd just say 'garbage' to that."
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* TOM WHARTON can be contacted at wharton@sltrib.com. His phone number is 801-257-8909. Send comments about this story to livingeditor@sltrib.com.
