ST. LOUIS, MO.
St. Louis, Missouri, the “gateway to westward expansion,” is the locale for this year’s Mormon History Association Conference, which got underway Thursday, June 1, with two pre-conference tours that each included a visit to the city’s famous “Gateway Arch.”
Some 350 Mormon History enthusiasts have convened at the St. Charles Convention Center adjacent to St. Louis for the two-day conference over Friday and Saturday. More than 100 presenters and panelists will conduct more than three dozen sessions pertaining to Mormon History. Much of the content will focus on St. Louis and the theme “Crossing and Dwelling in Mormon History,” alluding to the city’s role as the starting point for the settlement of the West.
The bus tours were each highlighted with a visit to the city’s iconic Gateway Arch, a historic site more formally known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.
Conference attendees were among visitors who rode trams to the top of the arch’s interior. There, they gazed out of windows affording views of the Mississippi River on the east and the cityscape on the west, including the Old Courthouse. That is the location where the famous Dred Scott decision of the 1800s was first argued. The eventual U.S. Supreme Court decision infamously held that a slave, even one that had been freed, could not be a U.S. citizen and therefore could not sue in federal courts. The consequence was to heighten tensions that eventually brought on the Civil War.
But part of the tour dealt with the Mormon connection to the area in which the Arch and surrounding park have been constructed.
For example, the Concert Hall site, is located on the south side of Market Street between second and third streets.
“Mormon Sabbath day meetings were held twice each Sunday in the Concert Hall between 1848 and 1854,” said longtime St. Louis resident and Mormon History Association member Tom Farmer as he conducted one of the tours.
“The Church rented the Concert Hall part time from 1848 to 1854 for the 3,000-4,000 Saints who lived in the area.”
When the owner of the Concert Hall was going to raise the rent, the Church members moved to a Methodist chapel in 1854, which they rented on a full-time basis.
The Concert Hall no longer stands, but it was located to the rear of the landmark “Old Cathedral,” or Basilica of Saint Louis, King of France, the first Catholic cathedral west of the Mississippi River.
Tour attendees visited the cathedral, which was dedicated in 1834 and, with the Old Courthouse, is one of only two remaining structures in the city that predate the St. Louis fire of 1849.
The conference concludes Sunday with a morning devotional followed by two post-conference, overnight bus tours one heading for Nauvoo, Illinois, and the other for several Church historic sites in western Missouri.
