KANSAS CITY, MO.
Planning for the temple built at Kirtland, Ohio, and the one anticipated but never built at Independence, Mo., was interrelated, said Richard O. Cowan, a speaker at the Mormon History Association Conference.
Brother Cowan, professor of Church history and doctrine at BYU, spoke May 29 at the conference, which convened just a few miles from the spot in Independence where the temple was planned but never built, due to the persecution and expulsion of the Latter-day Saints from the city.
He said Joseph Smith was planning and designing the temple at Kirtland in June 1833, at the same time he presented his plan for the city of Zion in Independence, with 24 temples at its center.
Previously, in his book Temples to Dot the Earth, Brother Cowan wrote that the 24 buildings in Zion represented an expansion from the revelation calling for three sacred buildings at the heart of Kirtland. However, he said, new information has come to light in connection with the Joseph Smith Papers Project and with improved accessibility of documents in the Church's archives with the recent completion of the Church History Library in downtown Salt Lake City.
One of those documents, he said, is a set of plans for the temple in Independence. This, plus two other sets of drawings for that temple show that the temple anticipated for Independence would have looked something like the temple built in Kirtland, Brother Cowan explained.
Joseph Smith indicated that inside the first of the temples to be built in Independence, there was to be a set of pulpits at each end of a main hall, just like the Kirtland Temple. "The pulpits were to be occupied by different officers in the priesthood," he said. "If you relate the assignments of those pulpits to the names of the temples, there is a direct parallel."
New research has shown that the revelation that there be three sacred buildings in Kirtland came three months later than had been thought. Now, instead of concluding that the plan for 24 temples in Independence was an expansion of the three-temple design in Kirtland, Brother Cowan believes there was no such influence. Instead, he feels the influence went in the opposite direction, with the temple design in Independence influencing the design in Kirtland.
After the saints were driven from Jackson County, they settled Far West, Mo., where a temple was contemplated that was to be even larger than the one in Jackson County, Brother Cowan said. That temple was never constructed either, as the Church members ultimately were driven from the state in 1838.
That year, Church member Joseph Holbrook came back to Independence on business. He reported seeing the place where the Lord had revealed the temple was to be built. With the animosity existing at the time, Brother Holbrook said the Lord would have to do "a mighty work" in Jackson County for his word to be fulfilled. "Let that work be done!" he exclaimed.
