A temple will be built in the columbus, Ohio, area, President Gordon B. Hinckley announced April 25 during his address at a member meeting here. The temple will be among the 30 smaller temples announced by President Hinckley in the April general conference.
"I feel impressed to say," President Hinckley said at the conclusion of his remarks, "that when we leave here, we are going to take an hour or so before departing for New York to look around for a place where we might build a small temple in Columbus or in the nearby community.""We had a temple in Ohio at one time," he continued. "We were driven from it. It was desecrated. We do not have it. I think the time has come to build a temple in this great state of Ohio.
"We will build a small temple and if you overwork it, if you use it beyond its capacity, we'll build another one. And if that becomes overloaded, we'll build another one to accommodate the needs of the people.
"This temple will not be a large building, but will accommodate all of the temple ordinances and all of the needs. It will take care of about 30 people at a time," he explained. Hopefully, he went on, the response of the members will be such that "you will show by your faith the need for yet further houses of the Lord in this great and beutiful part of the country.
"Hopefully it won't be too lang before it can be dedicated and put to use. I would hope not more than a year or a year-and-a-half, at the most, provided we can find the right site.
"The new building . . . will be beautiful and there will be no sparing quality in its construction."
He observed, "I don't know when we will ever build a temple again as large as the Washington Temple. (Ohio is currently in the Washington Temple district.) I hope we can reach out with tese smaller buildings to the people, and that the people will respond with great faith to a house of the Lord in their midst."
Ohio has 45,000 members and 10 stakes with 109 wards ad branches. The Ohio Cleveland and Ohio Columbus missions will be joined by the new Ohio Cincinnati Mission in July. In Columbus, membership began to be built up after the turn of the century. A branch was created in Columbus by 1930, and the first stake was created in 1962. (A report of President Hinckley's address in Columbus will be in the May 9 issue of the Church News.)
A temple in Columbus will be about 150 miles south of the Church's first temple dedicated in 1836 in Kirtland, Ohio, near Cleveland. the new temple will be about half the size of the Kirtland Temple, which has 15,000 square feet. The Kirtland Temple was started in 1833 following the revelations now recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants (see D&C 84:5 and 88:119).
Ohio figures prominently in early Church history. From 1831-1838, Kirtland was the headquarters of the church, and at one time, had 3,200 members living there. the Church's first stake was organized in the Kirtland the same year, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and Council of the Seventy were organized there in 1835, and some 65 revelations of the Doctrine and Covenants were received in Ohio from February of 1831 to July of 1837.
The Kirtland Temple was erected while the infant body of the Church was in extreme poverty.
