The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
A sacred site, familiar sight
Kirtland Temple, mainstay in Lake County heritage, is both hallowed place and tourist attraction
The 182-year-old Kirtland Temple has crowned the top of the Route 306 hill in Kirtland since long before it was state route. Although it’s no longer used for regular church services, its hand-pulled bell rings across the area every Sunday morning at 9.
It can be seen for quite some distance from the valley below, where the early Mormons who built it settled and lived for a decade in the 1830s. Its white-stucco walls, which sparkle in the sunshine, are said to get their sheen from the glassware and crockery early Mormon women crushed to add to the stucco.
But that’s more urban legend than fact, says Temple Manager Seth Bryant, who is a church elder and also serves as a lay minister for the Independence, Missouri-based Community of Christ. His research in early church records has not confirmed that oft repeated belief.
Today, the Temple is owned and operated by the Community of Christ, which at one time was called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Bryant’s Community of Christ church has just 250,000 members.
Historic Kirtland, in the valley below, is a collection of original restored buildings owned and operated by the Mormons, also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. That church, based in Salt Lake City, has 15 million members worldwide.
“We’re like cousins,” Bryant said. “We have the same heritage as the church founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 but have evolved in different directions since his death in 1844. We basically divided over a family feud.”
Until just a few years ago, the Community of Christ church presidency was held by a descendant of Smith. The Mormon church was established by those who followed Brigham Young to Utah after Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum, were killed in Nauvoo, Illinois, after leaving Kirtland.
The Temple, both a national historic landmark and a sacred space, long has been part of the very fiber of Lake County. Today it is still used periodically for worship and is open for tours beginning each year in March.
Congregants at the Community of Christ Church worship in a building across the street, next door to the now-privately owned home of early church convert Sidney Rigdon, who moved there from Mentor to help organize the early church.
Members of both churches come from around the world to visit the Temple and Historic Kirtland so they can walk where their mutual ancestors lived, worked and worshipped while those ancestors established basic tenants of both faiths.
Scott Dockus, executive director of the Lake County Visitors Bureau, estimates up to 60,000 people come to Lake County every year to visit the two historic sites. That’s why he chose the Temple as the gathering place for a recent Brown Bag Lunch designed to put the focus on heritage tourism, one of the mainstays of the Bureau’s newly inaugurated Remarkable Lake County campaign.
With its many visitors, the adjacent sites drive much of the heritage tourism experienced in Lake County. The James A. Garfield National Historic site, operated by the National Park Service, saw 50,000 visitors in 2017, and there is great potential for additional visitors coming to see the sites associated with the Underground Railroad, Unionville Tavern, the LeRoy Meeting House and the historic old train station in Painesville, Dockus said.
During the Temple’s construction between 1833 and 1836, sandstone quarried south it — in what came to be Chapin Forest — was hauled by horse-drawn
sledge along what today is Route 306 to the Temple site. The huge stone pieces were used for the foundation, but the walls were made from rubble — a mixture of rough stone, mortar, glass and paint — held together by mortar, with stucco applied to their surface. Lines painted on the stucco give the illusion of mortar joints between large blocks of cut stone.
In an 1830s story in the now-closed Painesville Telegraph, a minister from a neighboring congregation called those followers of Smith who were building the Temple “a grotesque assemblage living in shanties and small huts not fit for human habitation.”
That sentiment was a
common one in the 1830s when suddenly the followers of Joseph Smith came to Kirtland to establish their community, disrupting the status quo.
Those who tour today’s Temple begin in the 10-year old Visitor Center on Joseph Street where they first see a video about the Temple. As the video ends, the curtain is drawn open to reveal the Temple, reached by a winding walkway through serene and carefully tended gardens.
Two large doorways open inward into a foyer, from which two sets of staircases spiral to the second floor. The doors and stairways were meant to separate men from women, who also were seated separately in the sanctuary. The genders continue to be separated in the Mormon church, although they’re not in the Community of Christ. The latter church has evolved to be more liberal, encouraging the ordination of women and the participation of LBGT members.
“The Temple is called a temple because of the language of the Bible,” explained Lachlan Mackay, coordinator for Community of Christ historic sites.
Mackay lives in Nauvoo, but he lived for 15 years in Kirtland when he was director for the Temple.
“It also was designed according to the Bible,” he said.
Using the Bible’s cubits for measures resulted in some strange architectural alignments, which can be seen where a foyer wall intersects a window.
The first two levels are almost-identical assembly rooms with tiers of pulpits on either end. They were designed to show at a glance the organizational structure of the church hierarchy, from elders to high priests, deacons, teachers and bishops. Fronts of the ornately carved wooden pulpits have gold embossed letters, but, unfortunately, their meanings have been lost in time.
Doorways are used to enter pews, keeping them warmer for times before central heating. A cushioned bench, which could be moved to face either end of the sanctuary, allowed
worshippers to turn and face pulpits at east and west ends of the church.
The upper and lower assembly rooms, known as inner courts, are accessed through outer courts. The first floor was intended for worship, the second floor for education. The firstfloor gathering space had curtains, called veils, suspended from the ceiling. They could be lowered to divide the large space into smaller spaces.
Large gothic windows around the exterior of the church allow natural light to fill the lower court. Sharp-eyed visitors might note the carved wooden leaves and other designs on the interior’s dentils and pediments and its keystone varied in different areas of the Temple.
“That’s because they had two different builders using different editions of the Asher Benjamin Architectural Guide as their resource,” explained Mackay.
According to Mackay, the language and early beliefs of the church were reflections of Christian Primitivism, a movement based on the Bible’s Book of Acts. The 55-by-65-foot space of the inner court was based on the Book of Revelation.
“In the old days, Temple attendance ranged from 400 to 1,000,” Mackay said. “These days we limit seating to 300.”
Today, according to Mackay and Bryant, more than 80 Christian denominations share the Kirtland Temple in their history, although they differ in leadership and interpretations.