The foundation of the Salt Lake Temple has been a topic of interest and inspiration since its drawn-out construction from 1853–1864, years of political uncertainty when scant resources were available. Church leaders undertook this large project against the daunting backdrop of working to provide food, shelter, and livelihoods for settlers and the perpetual stream of new immigrants. The builders drew on their own building know-how, as well as the best contemporary sources on architecture and engineering to provide a foundation that would support the Latter-day Saints’ most ambitious building project yet. The problems of building the temple foundation were solved with hard work, practical experience, and the inspiration to push forward until an acceptable solution was reached. Yet, in the ensuing years, their successful completion of the task has been misunderstood. Such misunderstandings have been perpetuated by historians not closely following primary documents and by members and leaders employing these inaccurate histories and oral traditions in the service of foundation-based spiritual analogies.1The Salt Lake Temple is a lieux de mémoire or “site of memory,” a material object upon which Latter-day Saints project an abundance of meaning in addition to the building's utilitarian function as a structure in which they perform temple ritual. It has been a site of memory that tells the story of faithful perseverance amidst financial hardship, personal sacrifice for the communal good, and a sign of God's hand in the building of the Latter-day Saint kingdom in the American West. Stories about its construction serve to augment its significance within the collective consciousness of Latter-day Saint memory and culture.As with any good site of memory, people have generated and perpetuated stories about the temple that are simply not true. This article addresses two of the most popular interrelated myths of the Salt Lake Temple: first, that the arches in the basement walls atop the footing were a divinely inspired type of engineering unknown in their day that made the temple earthquake proof, and second, that the entire foundation was taken up and replaced in 1858 after the conclusion of the Utah War. This will be done by accurately reconstructing the history of the temple's foundation based on contemporary documents and then addressing the origins of folklore surrounding these two topics. In addition, this article seeks to fill in a gap of historical knowledge in relation to the actual failures in the foundation's initial construction methods and the resulting corrections. While we assess the basis of these myths that have proliferated over the years, it is beyond the scope of this article to analyze the function of these myths in Latter-day Saint culture and history.Construction of the temple foundations consumed over ten of the forty years that the Salt Lake Temple took to build. Builders had to solve engineering and transportation problems to quarry, transport, cut, and place the large stone blocks while battling crickets and drought, the United States Army, and the financial and logistical demands of assisting tens of thousands of immigrants to Utah. They also had to determine what resources should be devoted to the foundations and what level of quality the workmanship should meet. One of the most successful decisions in terms of the temple's long-term stability was its location. Brigham Young's selection of the alluvial fan at the mouth of City Creek Canyon as the site to bear the tremendous weight of building was fortuitous. The dense layers of sand and gravel provide an excellent bearing medium for the heavy temple with its thick granite walls.It is important at the outset to define the various terms used in this article when referring to parts of the foundation. The first eight feet of the foundation is trapezoidal in cross section, sixteen feet wide at the base and tapering to approximately eight to ten feet wide at the top. This bottom element is the footing. The top row of stone in the footing is called the flagging course and is composed of thinner pieces of stone that were intended to level off the top of the footing. The upper eight feet of the foundation will be referred to as the basement wall. This includes inverted arches that rest upon the flagging course of the footing. Together the footing and the basement walls constitute the foundation—all this stonework being below grade.On February 14, 1853, Brigham Young dug his spade into the earth on the Temple Block to officially break ground for the construction of the Salt Lake Temple. He had just finished addressing the several thousand Saints gathered to witness the event from a buggy and had moved to the southeast corner of the future temple. In his characteristic directness, he dug a spade full of dirt and warned the packed crowd, “Get out of my way for I am going to throw this.”2 The crowd moved back, and Young forcefully cast the dirt outside the footprint of the future temple. A ceremonial turning of the earth would not do—he had to really initiate the excavation. Following the prayers and sermons, the assembled congregation “rushed to the hole to get a chance to throw a little dirt out.”3 Thus began a forty-year project constructing the primary building of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the most iconic structure of the Great Basin region.The construction of the wall surrounding the Temple Block provided a learning opportunity for workers to hone skills in quarrying stone, transporting stone, and assembling it into a structure. Initial plans called for the wall to have a sandstone base five feet tall and three feet thick at the top, sunk two and half feet below grade. Upon the “cut cap” an adobe wall would rise another ten feet.4 The Temple Block wall was reminiscent of the wall initiated, but never completed, around the Nauvoo Temple.5 In October 1852 plans were expanded to complete the wall with a six-feet-high iron picket fence and add a multiportal entrance gate featuring a statue of Joseph Smith, although these more ambitious plans were not realized. Since early plans for the temple had multiple ground-level entrances and no annex, the Temple Block wall may have been thought of as a boundary of sacred space. Young did say that the wall would secure the Temple Block from “spectators . . . drunkards[,] gamblers[,] and every foul curse that has been on other temples.”6Excavation for the Temple Block wall foundation began on February 13, 1852,7 with placement of the first stone on August 3, 1852.8 Daniel H. Wells was the superintendent, Alonzo H. Raleigh was the foreman,9 and some of the laborers were provided by the Public Works Department, a church-sponsored initiative organized the year before to provide employment for those without means.10 For the Temple Block wall, as well as with the temple itself, other laborers donated labor as tithing-in-kind or as fulfillment of ward assignments.11 One presumes that the skill level of workers varied and that the Temple Block wall project provided on-the-job training for some.Prior to the start of construction of the Temple Block wall, church authorities identified Red Butte Canyon, four and a half miles from the Temple Block, as an important source of both building stone and timber. Looking to expedite the transportation of these natural materials from the canyon to the city center, the church chartered the Red Butte Rail Road Company and broke ground for the project in late April of 1851.12 Construction specifications called for wood sleepers and wood rails, as iron for the more conventional iron rails was in extremely short supply in the years prior to the arrival of the transcontinental railroad eighteen years later. Since the canyon is at a higher elevation than the Temple Block, the intent was to load the cars in the canyon and coast them down into town with a brakeman in control. Employing wooden railroads and wooden plank roads to cover short distances was a common practice in the early nineteenth century. In the eastern states, wood rails were reinforced with iron straps nailed to the top of the rails to reduce the crushing of wood fibers where heavy wheel loads bore on the rails. However, in iron-poor Utah, reinforcing the wood rail with iron was apparently not an option.Church leaders abandoned construction of the railroad from Red Butte Canyon not long after commencing it. Why they did so is not clear, although an epistle of the First Presidency cited “insufficient laborers” as a cause.13 The reality that the system could not handle the heavy loads generated by a stone quarry may also have become quickly apparent. Whatever the causes, the office of public works bypassed the rail system and began construction of a wagon road in May 1852.14The transportation of stone was a significant challenge in the early years of the Salt Lake City settlement. Not all wagons built for agricultural use would be sufficiently stout to carry loads of building stone, much like a pickup truck today cannot handle the loads carried by dual-axle dump trucks. The first call to volunteers to haul stone to the Temple Block resulted in cobble-sized stones that were inadequate for the foundation. Unable to make use of the small stones, a public notice went out rolling back the invitation for volunteers to bring stones to the Temple Block, asking for a little time to determine how to move larger stones.15 The design intent for the Temple Block wall foundation was to have stones over one ton in weight,16 not the smaller cobbles initially delivered in the first call for volunteers. Handling and transporting stones of the weight needed for foundations would require both stout equipment and careful technique. Likely, much was learned about logistics during the Temple Block wall construction.Even before the Saints arrived in the valley, Young suggested the design of the new temple would follow the pattern established in Nauvoo. He had intended for the architect of the Nauvoo Temple, William Weeks, to design the Salt Lake Temple. However, when Weeks and his wife Caroline left the church in June 1848,17 Young eventually settled on his brother-in-law Truman O. Angell, who worked with Weeks on the Nauvoo Temple.With the near completion of the base of the Temple Block wall, focus turned to the temple itself. Plans moved forward during the October 1852 general conference with a public discussion of temple building. On the final day of the conference, Heber C. Kimball raised the issue of materials for building the temple. He suggested possibilities ranging from the sandstone already in use for the base of the Temple Block wall to adobe used in the construction of the tithing office to the “splendid stone” (oolite) quarried in Sanpete County. Though he mentioned the possibility of adobe several times, Kimball ultimately proposed that the Saints use stone in the construction of the temple. Following supportive comments made by George A. Smith and John Taylor, Kimball again took the stand and declared a motion to “build a Temple of the best materials that can be obtained in the mountains of North America, and that the [First] Presidency dictate where the Stone and other materials shall be obtained.” The motion was seconded and carried.18Unanimous support for Kimball's motion failed to settle the issue for Brigham Young. At the conclusion of the conference, he offered his “opinion” on the subject. Judging himself a “chemist in theory” though not in practice, Young advanced a pseudoscientific argument for building the temple of adobe bricks. Young believed that the great pyramids of Egypt were built of mud brick, similar to adobe used in the Salt Lake Valley. Based on this belief, he reasoned that after many years, adobe would “compose” into stone. He said that sandstone, limestone, and the oolite found in Sanpete County had already reached peak composition and were now in a state of decomposition. For that reason, he argued that a temple built of adobes would outlast one built of sandstone, limestone, or oolite. Although Young differed with the opinions expressed by the Saints, including the members of the Twelve, he suggested he would ultimately acquiesce to their desires.19Following Young's ideas, Angell's initial plans for the temple called for thick adobe walls faced with freestone, probably the oolitic limestone from Sanpete County that would eventually be used to build the Manti Temple.20 His March 1853 plan (dating to the month following the groundbreaking ceremony) shows walls ten feet thick at the top of the footing (including the thickness of the freestone veneer). Adobe is much weaker than building stone, and to limit the stress on the material, Angell specified the walls to be very thick to spread the load over a larger area. William Ward, Angell's assistant, later recalled that “on several occasions the foundations and thickness of the walls was the subject of conversations.”21 This extremely wide basement wall and footing significantly increased the quantity of soil that needed to be excavated.Following the groundbreaking ceremony, workers proceeded to complete the trenches for the foundations based on the adobe-walled plan. Workers were recruited from the local wards, and Apostle Wilford Woodruff was the superintendent over the excavation.22 There were adequate numbers of workers but insufficient numbers of teams and wagons to haul away the dirt. Lack of teams slowed the work enough that a general call from the Deseret News exclaimed, “Are there not a few extra teams roaming on the prairie, that the brethren would like to put into the Temple service, when they are informed of the need of them?”23 Young's confident declaration at the groundbreaking on February 14, 1853, that the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the temple would take place in less than two months on April 6, 1853, put a squeeze on the work. Accordingly, workers fully excavated the corners of the building foundation outline where the cornerstones would be placed and advanced the trenches in between as best as could be accomplished. The trenches eventually would be twenty feet wide and sixteen feet deep on the east end of the temple, but due to the six feet change in grade from east to west, the trench on the west end was only ten feet deep. The excavated trenches reached a stratum of well-packed gravel,24 an excellent bearing medium due to its density and ability to drain away excess moisture.As excavation for the footings progressed, Young attempted to revive the abandoned wooden railroad to Red Butte Canyon and called for workers to complete it.25 If this railroad would have worked, it would have saved enormous quantities of time and expense. However, unnamed difficulties (perhaps the inability for wood rails to bear the weight of cars laden with stone) prevented the project from being completed. The sandstone cornerstones were prepared in the quarry, measuring 6 x 4 x 2 feet and weighing a little over seven thousand pounds.26 Beyond the means for volunteers with agricultural wagons to transport, a contract for moving the stones was given to John, Joseph, and Adam Sharp who used heavy wagons and an ox team.27 The final cornerstone arrived on the Temple Block and was placed on April 5, 1853, one day ahead of the ceremony,28 no doubt causing some anxious moments.On the morning of April 6, 1853, a crowd of six thousand assembled for the occasion, with less than half that number able to fit into the old tabernacle where John Taylor led the congregation in prayer and Brigham Young called the meeting to order.29 Following performances by the color guard and bands, a procession of general authorities and a selection of “architects and workmen” under the banner “Zion's Workmen” made their way to the southeast corner of the temple excavation site.30 The ceremony began in the southeast corner, where all three members of the First Presidency, Patriarch John Smith, Thomas Bulloch, and likely Truman O. Angell surmounted the cornerstone, already in place, to officially dedicate it unto the Lord.31 On behalf of Brigham Young, Thomas Bulloch delivered an oration, presumably written or reviewed by Brigham Young, on the history of the ancient temples of the Israelites and those built in the latter days.32 Following the oration, Heber C. Kimball offered a prayer of consecration and dedication. In a clockwise direction, the other stones were dedicated in a similar fashion—a prayer preceded by the act of “laying the stone” and an oration atop the stone. Presiding Bishop Edward Hunter gave the oration for the southwest cornerstone, and Alfred Cordon, a bishop in Willard City who acted in the capacity of traveling bishop, offered the prayer.33 On the northwest cornerstone, John Young, president of the high priests gave the oration, and George B. Wallace, John Young's counselor, offered the prayer.34 The procession finally moved to the northeast cornerstone. Apostle Parley P. Pratt gave the oration, followed by Apostle Orson Hyde—representing the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the presidency of the seventies, and the president of the elder's quorum. Following the last dedicatory prayer, from atop the northeast cornerstone, Brigham Young blessed the crowd, asking the Lord to bless and protect the Saints “until we have finished this temple received a fullness of our endowments there in [and] then build many more.”35The excavation was sufficiently complete to commence laying the sandstone footing on June 16, 1854, at the southeast corner of the temple36 with Alonzo H. Raleigh as the public works foreman.37 The work proceeded well, with progress hastening or slacking depending upon the supply of stone arriving from the quarry, the amount of lime produced for the mortar, or the availability of workers who were sometimes diverted to other public works projects.38 At times, as many as sixty masons were active on-site, and the footings took a little over a year to complete.39 Upon completion, the pyramidal footings provided solid structures upon which to build the rest of the massive temple. Their sixteen-foot-wide base spread the load out over a greater area, reducing the stresses on the soil below.During the construction of the footings, debates continued about the material to be used for the temple walls. Practical experience would have illustrated the implausibility of building a structure the height of the temple using adobe bricks, even with walls eight feet thick. Truman O. Angell's February 1852 plans for the nearby Beehive House started out as a three-story adobe structure with an office wing.40 However, by the time that construction began on the Beehive House in May 1853,41 the large three-story structure was abandoned and two smaller two-story buildings were substituted. Angell clearly had little confidence in the adobe bricks to support such a substantial building. Indeed, when adobe is wetted from rains or melting snow, its own dead weight will crush it for a wall over thirty-five feet high.42 In late 1854 the decision was made to use the large granite boulders found in the bottom of Big Cottonwood Canyon, and then in 1860, the granite boulders from Little Cottonwood Canyon.43 The “Cottonwood granite”44 is far more durable than adobe and can bear significantly higher compressive stresses. However, no change was made to the thickness of the walls when granite was substituted for adobe. Since the footings were already about halfway completed and building plans were already drawn up, leaders decided to keep the thickness as initially designed. This decision had far-reaching implications, as quarrying sufficient granite to construct eight-foot-thick walls tapering to six feet at the top was an enormous task in and of itself. When Angell initially prepared the drawings for the foundations, those working in the Church Historian's Office recorded, “There <will be> more stone <in the> foundat<ion> <of> this Temple than <in the> whole Nauvoo temple.”45 Imagine their reaction one year later when Cottonwood granite was designated for the entire temple superstructure.Although granite had been selected for the temple walls, teams continued to transport sandstone from Red Butte Canyon to the Temple Block for the temple footing. By April 1855 Angell issued orders for specially cut stones for the leveling course on top of the footing.46 This flagging course was thinner than the course of large stones in the main footing, and it was important that it be level and true, as it would support the basement walls and main walls above. But the flagging course was not installed as carefully and accurately as it should have been. Its deviations and misalignments would create difficulties down the road as the construction proceeded. Based on later accounts and from repair work on the footing, workers apparently achieved a level course by shimming the large flagging stones in place with smaller rubble stones. Also, wooden rollers, used to transport and position the flagging course, were in some cases left in position under the flagging stones to help level the course.47Angell's design for the walls specified a series of upside-down arches to be built at the bottom of each of the sections of the sandstone basement wall beneath the first course of windows. The arches evenly distribute the load of the solid masonry piers across the lengths of the footings. One can think of them as an inverted masonry arched bridge, which applies an even stress to the stone coursing below. For large buildings such as the Salt Lake Temple, these inverted arches lessen the likelihood of the heavily loaded footing lengths under the stone piers settling more than the lightly loaded footing lengths under the windows. Such differential settlement would cause cracking in the masonry walls of the temple.During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, descriptions of the temple matter-of-factly mentioned the use of inverted arches in its design to evenly distribute the weight of the temple walls on its foundation.48 Salt Lake Temple recorder Duncan McNeil McAllister, for example, wrote in 1904, “Inverted arches are constructed in the foundation, to distribute evenly the enormous pressure of the massive walls.”49 But later in the twentieth century, a mythology surrounding the arches emerged and became widely believed.50 This mythology casts them as an ahistorical engineering solution revealed to Truman Angell by God and that the use of inverted arches was unknown in the United States at the time of the temple's construction.51 A further misconception regarding the foundations is that during an earthquake the temple would rock on the inverted arches and thereby survive the large lateral forces. While the inverted arches do increase the capacity of the foundations with respect to vertical ground motions, they have no influence on lateral ground motions. In reality, if all sixteen arches were to rock independently, the walls of the temple would be torn apart. Yet this myth persists, despite its improbability.52Inverted arches like those Angell included in the Salt Lake Temple were illustrated in engineering and building manuals of the time. If Angell was not already familiar with the convention, he could have read about it in two books that were in the Utah Territorial Library: Mahan's Elementary Course in Civil Engineering, and Downing and Wightwick's Hints to Young Architects. Both of these texts recommend and illustrate inverted arches for the foundations of large buildings.53 The volumes were among those in the architecture and engineering section that Brigham Young and others carefully selected to bring to the new territory.54 These reference books were heavily used by Angell in his designs for the temple and other buildings.Under the direction of the First Presidency,55 James Moyle, the foreman of the stonecutters, hollowed out a “firestone” box for preserving records. The box measured “two feet six inches long, one foot eight inches wide, and one foot six inches thick.” Moyle noted, “The hole for the records is about two (2) feet long and one foot 2 inches (1ft-2in) wide and one foot deep, and is covered with a thin slab of hard sand stone, about two inches let into the stone, to make the top of the slab level with the top of the stone.”56 On the evening of August 13, 1857, the First Presidency, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and a few others gathered to place items of historical significance in the record stone and lay it in the first course of stone on the southeast end of the southern basement wall. The items included a number of books, tracts, newspapers, and gold coins. After Brigham Young and Wilford Woodruff placed the items in the box, the lid was soldered in place with lead, the whole was covered in plaster of Paris, and the box was laid in place. Brigham Young concluded the proceedings by offering a prayer dedicating the contents of the box to the Lord to come forth at some future day “for the benefit of the House of Israel.”57Natural and political disasters combined to significantly slow progress on the Salt Lake Temple after June 1855 when the footings were initially completed. First, poor harvests, infestations of crickets, and continued immigration of Saints that had to be fed forced Young to halt construction and focus on keeping the territory from starving. Second, with the materials switch from adobe to granite, the large stones for the walls had to be transported from Big and later Little Cottonwood Canyons. A canal was proposed to transport the stone, for which Young obtained permission from the legislative assembly of Utah Territory on February 1, 1855.58 Another benefit of such a canal would be to bring irrigation water to the valley.59 Despite the poor harvest and harsh winter, workers that might have labored on the temple walls were put to work digging the canal. Various wards sent laborers with “zeal and energy” for the work.60 One 1856 report noted that “hundreds of people were at work at the Big Cottonwood Canal.”61 The planned hiatus from temple construction gave an opportunity for Young to call Truman O. Angell, his temple architect, on a “mission” to learn from the architecture of Europe—a trip that ended up not really influencing the design of the temple at all. Since the focus of energy in 1856 was the canal, Angell was not needed and Young viewed it as a good opportunity to educate the skilled builder and technician in the aesthetics of architectural design. Despite all the labor that went into digging the canal, when water was turned into the canal bed, the water percolated into the porous soils near the mouth of Parley's Canyon. Although the canal did help irrigate the farms in the valley, it was never used to transport stone to the Temple Block.Increased availability of “materials & provisions” at harvest time in 1856 allowed the Public Works Department to begin partial operations, including hauling stones to the Temple Block, but only in preparation for the spring of 1857.62 The Big Cottonwood quarry was sixteen miles from the Temple Block, and the Little Cottonwood quarry (where most of the stone would be obtained in future years) was eighteen miles distant. The journey took two days with heavily laden wagons in good weather with dry, firm roadbeds. In wet weather the roads deteriorated, and the difficult task became nearly impossible. Despite these obstacles, as many as thirty teams hauled stones from both Red Butte Canyon (for the Temple Block wall) and Big Cottonwood Canyon (for the temple) in 1857.63 As many as twenty stonecutters labored on the Temple Block to dress the rough-cut stone hauled from the quarries.64 Through the use of a derrick prepared by Alonzo H. Raleigh, stones were lowered into place on the temple's basement walls.65 Most of the basement wall resting on the sandstone footing would be constructed of Cottonwood granite. On May 23 of that year, masons completed construction of the Temple Block wall, allowing for their focus to turn fully to the temple.66On July 24, 1857, the Saints celebrated an important milestone. Ten years earlier, they had arrived in the Salt Lake Valley. They chose to celebrate the occasion at the top of Big Cottonwood Canyon—twice passing the location of the temple stone quarry on this excursion. At noon, during the celebration, messengers came and informed Brigham Young that an army was marching toward Utah, having been sent by United States president James Buchanan to install a new governor in the territory.67 The focus of church leadership was now the defense of the territory through harassment of the army's supply lines and buying time for negotiations. However, public works employees continued to extend the basement wall a full two-and-a-half courses (nearly two and a half feet) by the end of the 1857 season.68Church raiders successfully slowed the advance of the United States Army, forcing the soldiers to winter at Fort Bridger. With the coming of spring and the reestablishment of supply lines, in March 1858 Brigham Young decided to cache the unlaid stones in the hole that had been dug for the foundation and basement. Unsure what would follow the arrival of a military force, and perhaps hoping to deter the military from plundering or damaging the stone, Young ordered workers to bury the cached stones, footings, and basement walls.69 He also ordered that the shops on the Temple Block, including tools and derricks, be removed, with the exception of portions of the public works shop required for fixing wagons and shoeing animals.70 Rather than risk an open conflict with the United States military, Brigham Young evacuated most of the Saints south and instructed others to prepare to burn Salt Lake City to the ground should the military deviate from the negotiated plan to have the army march through