The Cardston Alberta Temple Opens as the First Latter-day Saint Temple Outside the United States

On 26 August 1923, President Heber J. Grant dedicated the Cardston Alberta Temple across eleven separate sessions, thirty years after the Salt Lake Temple's 1893 dedication, already recorded here, and thirteen years before Heber J. Grant announced the Church Security Plan in 1936, also recorded here. The temple stood at Cardston, the settlement Charles Ora Card had led Latter-day Saint families to found in 1887 after crossing into southern Alberta, and Church President Joseph F. Smith announced in 1912 that a temple would be built there to serve members too distant from Utah's own temples to reach easily. Construction, put out to competitive bid among prominent architects and won by Hyrum Pope and Harold Burton, broke ground on 9 November 1913; delayed by the First World War and by the cost of more than three thousand six hundred tons of granite, it ran a full decade before the finished building, an octagonal design departing from earlier temples' towers and assembly halls, was consecrated. It was, at its dedication, the first Latter-day Saint temple built outside the United States, predating the Church's later expansion across Canada, Europe and the global South. The Government of Canada designated the building a National Historic Site in 1992, citing its craftsmanship and its place at the center of the country's first Mormon settlement; it was rededicated in 1962 and again in 1991 following renovation.