![]() Kimball was dispatched to the nearby mountains, returning towards evening “with some good house logs and poles for measuring.” 13 With reliable rods in hand, Pratt and Sherwood were back on the Temple block on Tuesday, August 3. The surveyors had to wait “until the chain could be tested by a standard pole, which had to be brought from the mountains.” The apostle Heber C. 12 Henry Sherwood and Orson Pratt, who served as scientific observer on the trail west, began to take the measure of the holy city as a warm breeze blew from the northwest, but the work was cut short when their measuring rods proved inadequate for running city lines. “We have commenced the survey of a city this morning,” Young wrote to Charles C. In this plan there will be no houses fronting each other on the opposite sides of streets.” 10 Young is often credited with originality here, yet, as David Bigler noted, the geometrical design, including its famous streets wide enough for a wagon and team to turn around easily, “is almost a carbon copy of plans for an earlier Mormon city, ‘New Jerusalem, City of Zion,’ designed by Joseph Smith” (fig. with -foot-square blocks-ten acres!” 9 “Upon every alternate block,” wrote Pratt in 1850, “four houses were to be built on the east, and four on the west sides of the square, but none on the north and south sides. Church leaders “approved the building of the temple on the square, the laying out of wide streets (eight rods), spacious lots (each one acre and a quarter), and sidewalks twenty feet wide, and mandated that houses be located far enough from neighboring homes to prevent fire from spreading house to house.” 8 The perfect squares were thus separated by streets that were 132 feet wide, making the embryonic city “y far the largest grid in the nation (and probably in the world). The first days of Utah history are vividly chronicled in Thomas Bullock’s diary. 5 After “the dark clouds of sorrow” gathered above Nauvoo, forcing the abandonment of most of the city, the surveyor became the oldest member of the vanguard company to settle the corner of Mexican territory on the eastern edge of the Great Basin. Smith employed Sherwood to survey his properties, and others in Nauvoo also called upon him to carry out these tasks. 4 Many of the twenty-eight remaining years of his life were devoted to church affairs. According to Wilford Woodruff, Joseph Smith commanded him “in the name of Jesus Christ to arise and come out of his tent,” and before long Sherwood made an astonishing recovery. Sherwood had converted to the LDS church in 1832, but on July 22, 1839, he was hovering near death in Commerce, Illinois, the hamlet on the Mississippi River the Latter-day Saints purchased in 1839 and renamed Nauvoo. In a word, he was the most experienced surveyor among the first wave of settlers. 3īrigham Young knew intuitively that Sherwood (1785–1867) was the only man for the job. SHERWOOD, AUGUST 3, 1847, WHEN BEGINNING THE ORIGINAL SURVEY OF ‘GREAT SALT LAKE CITY,’ AROUND THE ‘MORMON’ TEMPLE SITE DESIGNATED BY BRIGHAM YOUNG JULY 28, 1847” (figs. According to Thomas Bullock, Young’s “clerk of the camp,” “President Young waived his hands and said, ‘Here is the forty acres for the Temple lot.’” He then instructed Orson Pratt, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, to “tell Father Sherwood how many degrees of variation of compass there is at this spot, so that the City may be laid out perfectly Square North & South, East & West.” 2 Today that spot is located on the southeast corner of Temple Square where a plaque spells out in bronze letters: “FIXED BY ORSON PRATT ASSISTED BY HENRY G. Four days after Brigham Young arrived in the valley, he selected the place that would forever mark the geographical and spiritual center of Mormonism. In the annals of Mormon history, nothing is more Homeric than the Latter-day Saints’ overland trek from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Great Salt Lake Valley in 1847.
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