A Small Church Guards an Empty Lot

In 1831, only fifteen months after organizing the church that became the Latter Day Saint movement, Joseph Smith identified a specific parcel of land in Independence, Missouri, as the future site of a temple marking the movement's prophesied gathering place, and he and Sidney Rigdon formally dedicated the site that August. The Latter Day Saints were driven out of Missouri only a few years later, and the land itself passed through other hands for decades before a former Latter Day Saint named Granville Hedrick, who had chosen not to follow the main body of the church west to Utah, organized a separate congregation and returned to Independence, purchasing the original temple lot in 1867. That congregation, informally called the Hedrickites and formally the Church of Christ, still holds and maintains the small, largely undeveloped 2.5 acre parcel today, treating it as the genuine site named in Joseph Smith's original 1831 revelation, even though no temple has ever been built there. Two much larger Latter Day Saint successor bodies, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Community of Christ, both maintain their own buildings on adjoining portions of the same historic site, making the Temple Lot a rare place where competing branches of one religious movement coexist as neighbors.