The St. George Utah Temple Is Dedicated, the Church's First Since Nauvoo

Thirty years after the Latter day Saints were established in Utah by Brigham Young's 1847 arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, already recorded here, and roughly a decade before federal pressure over plural marriage began building toward the 1890 Manifesto, also recorded here, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints completed and dedicated the first temple it had built since abandoning the Nauvoo Temple in Illinois three decades earlier. Construction at St. George, in Utah's southern desert, had begun in 1871 under Brigham Young's direction, using volcanic rock hauled from a nearby hill and lime burned locally to compensate for the region's poor building stone. The building opened for ordinance work on 1 January 1877, when Wilford Woodruff dedicated the baptistry, Erastus Snow the assembly room and Brigham Young Jr. the sealing room, and a full formal dedication followed on 6 April 1877 under President Daniel H. Wells. St. George was the first temple where Latter day Saints could perform proxy endowments for the deceased, a practice central to the church's theology of salvation for ancestors, and its completion let Brigham Young, who died four months later in August 1877, see in his lifetime the restoration of temple ordinances the loss of Nauvoo had interrupted. Historians of Mormonism treat the St. George dedication as the moment the church's temple system took durable root in the Utah territory the 1847 migration had opened.