The Kirtland Temple, completed in 1836 in northeastern Ohio, was the first temple the Latter day Saint movement ever finished, built while Joseph Smith still led the church from Kirtland rather than from the Missouri, Illinois or Utah headquarters that followed it. The building predates the movement's more famous temples by decades and survives today as a National Historic Landmark, still standing on the site where Smith reported the visions that shaped the church's early temple theology.
Kirtland was not an isolated experiment. Ohio in the same general period hosted several Shaker communities, including Union Village and North Union, congregations of the United Society of Believers practicing celibacy and communal ownership under leadership the tradition held to be divinely guided, and the Zoar Separatists, a German Pietist sect that settled Zoar in 1817 and held all property in common for nearly eighty years before dissolving in 1898. Both groups organized their whole economic and social life around a specific reading of scripture, holding possessions in common in a way most of their Protestant neighbors found alarming, and both left behind physical settlements, since restored, that document how thoroughly the arrangement extended into daily work and domestic life rather than remaining a matter of Sunday belief alone. Ohio's run of these experiments, Mormon, Shaker and Pietist alike, makes the state one of the richest sites for nineteenth century communal religious history outside New York's own Burned over District.