Latter-day Saint students at Snow College received Monday what just five years ago would have seemed an unlikely gift: a temple almost on their campus.

The newly completed Ephraim Temple, featuring golden yellows and various blues common to the farming region, sits just blocks from the Sanpete County campus. It will serve more than 60,000 members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in central Utah, including the majority of Snow’s 5,525 students. The Utah-based faith has two young single adult stakes (regional groups) and 20 congregations for students and other single adults in the area.

“I am super excited,” said 21-year-old Alivya Osborn, who is in her second year at the college after serving a church mission in Brisbane, Australia.

Though Osborn, who serves as vice president of a church-sponsored institute council, has a car, she knows many Latter-day Saint students who don’t. While the pioneer-era Manti Temple is close, she said, those seven miles are too far to walk.

“Our chapel is next to the Ephraim Temple, so we could go to church and see it,” said Osborn, who is also on the President’s Leadership Team for the college. “We would walk past it as much as we could — even though it was not open — just to enjoy watching its progress.”

And now it’s open. Public tours will run from Wednesday through Sept. 19 before it is dedicated by apostle Ronald A. Rasband on Oct. 11 and open only to devout members.

Of the two temples in the county, the Ephraim one will be the “workhorse” and the historic Manti edifice “will be the show horse,” said Latter-day Saint Michael Austin, Snow’s provost and vice president for academic affairs.

A revised plan for the county

Having two temples so close together in a sparsely populated agricultural region seemed unlikely in 2021.

Back then, the church was going to renovate the Manti Temple, including removal of its renowned World Room mural by celebrated Latter-day Saint artist Minerva Teichert.

Teichert’s painting, which depicts a panorama of biblical and secular history through the ages, is considered one of Mormonism’s artistic masterpieces.

The proposed removal ignited widespread protests, petitions and phone calls. Within a couple of months, the decision was reversed.

“As we have continued to seek the direction of the Lord on this matter,” then-President Russell M. Nelson said in a prerecorded message, “we have been impressed to modify our earlier plans for the Manti Utah Temple so that the pioneer craftsmanship, artwork and character will be preserved, including the painted murals loved by so many. We will leave those murals where they are located now — inside the Manti Utah Temple.”

That’s when Nelson announced the construction of a brand-new temple in Ephraim.

While that new temple was being built, the Manti structure closed for an extensive makeover in October 2021. It reopened to the public in March 2024 to widespread praise from preservationists, visitors and even relatives of the artists.

“It literally takes your breath away when you walk in the room,” said Dorothy Teichert, Minerva’s daughter-in-law. The murals were “brighter and cleaner. The church did a beautiful job of restoring the majestic paintings.”

More than 230,000 visitors flocked to Manti during a three-week open house. Nelson — whose father, Marion, was born in Manti, and his mother, Edna, came from nearby Ephraim — rededicated the temple in April 2024.

A study in contrasts

The Manti Temple sits atop a hill overlooking the valley and farms below. The Ephraim Temple is on a street, two blocks from the college, that was an empty field.

One day, Latter-day Saint artist Kathleen Peterson’s son snapped a photo of sheep grazing on the land near the new temple. It presented an apt image of the place she knew so well (she and her family had lived in an adjacent lot), so she painted it.

“Sanpete County is sheep country,” said Peterson, who tried to capture the juxtaposition that spoke to the rural experience. It provided “all kinds of symbolism.”

That makes the temple “down-home,” she said, “and accessible.”

The two-story, 40,000-square-foot building includes two towers, the taller one rising nearly 157 feet into the air without a golden Angel Moroni statue, found on many of the faith’s temples.

Artistic details include “motifs of wheat, oxeye daisy and forget-me-not blossoms,” a church news release said Monday, to “honor the city’s agricultural legacy and Scandinavian heritage.”

Utah is home to 32 existing or planned Latter-day Saint temples.

Unlike the church’s more common meetinghouses, members view temples as “Houses of the Lord,” places where the faithful participate in their highest religious rites, such as eternal marriage.