Like the 19th century structure it emulates, the new Nauvoo Illinois Temple is being constructed with painstaking attention to craftsmanship and quality. And that is no truer than in the intricate stonework now being created for facing of the temple's exterior and for the baptismal font, according to the man who was called to coordinate the acquisition, tooling and carving of the stone.
Keith P. MacKay and his wife, Karma, were among the first Church missionaries called to work on the new temple that President Gordon B. Hinckley proclaimed "will stand as a memorial to those who built the first such structure there on the banks of the Mississippi." (April 1999 general conference.)
In replicating the original stone, Elder MacKay is working under the direction of FFKR architects.
"I have an article that says they hired carvers from all over the United States of 1841 to do the sun stones and moon stones and star stones of the original Nauvoo Temple," said Elder MacKay, whose 46-year-old, Utah-based business, State Stone, has done restorative work on prominent buildings in many parts of the country, not the least of which is the Manti Utah Temple.
True to the legacy of the original Nauvoo Temple's builders, and led by what he considers guidance from the Lord, Elder MacKay engaged craftsmen in Canada, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Idaho as well as Utah to replicate the distinctive architectural features that characterized the exterior of the 1840s temple, as well as the baptismal font with its 12 oxen.
"And they're the finest carvers in the United States and Canada, as far as I'm concerned," he said. "People that work on stone are a high-class group, because they have to love it, or they wouldn't work that hard."
Few of them are members of the Church, but they have all been invited to attend the temple open house, which will occur some time in 2002, "and they all can't wait to do it," Elder MacKay said.
Not just in the selection of artisans, but in all aspects of the project, divine guidance has come to bear, he said, even in the initial selection of limestone material that will be used to face the concrete walls of the temple.
Early on, it was assumed that rock would be taken from the quarries in and around Nauvoo that yielded the material for the original temple; this was soon found to be unfeasible. The two main quarries are under water today, the Mississippi River being higher due to a dam having been constructed years ago at Keokuk, Iowa, south of Nauvoo. Test drilling was done at other nearby quarries, but the rock was found to be unsuitable, having been fractured too extensively from blasting that had been done over the years.
Selecting the stone
The stone that was eventually selected was found through professional networking. A friend of Elder MacKay, Ted Orchard, is the owner of Idaho Travertine in Idaho Falls, Idaho, the company that cut the granite for the new Conference Center and is now a sub-contractor working on the limestone for the Nauvoo Temple. Brother Orchard was acquainted with the owner of a Minnesota company that had purchased a limestone quarry in Russellville, Ala.
"He had called Ted and told him he had this rock for sale," Elder MacKay recalled. "And Ted had heard about the Nauvoo Temple going up, so he called me and told me I ought to go look at that rock."
With project administrator Ronald Prince, Elder MacKay visited the quarry. To their amazement, the two men found the limestone to be nearly indistinguishable from the grayish-white material that composed the original temple as evidenced by remnants from that first building.
"You can hold it side by side, and it's just about a perfect match, right down to the black veins running through it," Elder MacKay remarked.
With the material selected, there remained the challenge of forming the limestone so as to duplicate as nearly as possible the appearance of the original edifice.
With its general design conceived by the Prophet Joseph Smith, the 1840s temple was characterized by 30 pilasters resting upon moon stones and crowned by sun stones, with star stones engraved above them. The outstanding interior feature was the baptismal font, with the basin and 12 oxen all carved from the same limestone as the building's exterior.
Translating those images of the past into present-day reality was the task of LaVar Wallgren and his Salt Lake City-based 3D Art Inc. It was an endeavor approached with resourcefulness and helped along by blessings.
In fashioning models for the font, for example, the company visited This Is the Place Heritage Park in Salt Lake City and took reference pictures of some of the live oxen that are kept there. A hand-size fragment of the leg of one of the oxen in the original temple, which had been preserved in a museum in Nauvoo, gave designers an idea of the texture of the hide in the original oxen carvings.
Replicating was challenge
Replicating the sun, moon and star stones was another challenge. Two largely intact sun stones from the original are known to exist: One is owned and displayed by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., purchased in 1989 from the historical society in Quincy, Ill.; the other, the sun stone that is at the Visitors Center in Nauvoo, belongs to the state of Illinois, and the state has designated Nauvoo Restoration Inc. as the custodian of the sun stone. Though helpful for reference, these, of course, were not available or suitable for use as models.
But news that the temple was to be rebuilt brought forth a number of small miracles in the form of fragments of stones from and rare detail photographs of the original temple. "People would come forward and say they had this or that item and maybe it would help," Elder MacKay said.
For example one man furnished a large piece of a sun stone he had acquired earlier from an antique dealer, which still had the intricate ornamentation of trumpets above the sun's face. Working from photographs and using clay, designers sculpted out the missing portion of the sun stone, including the nose that had been broken off. Then, 28 coats of latex were poured over the finished piece and peeled away when it was cooled, forming a mold from which fiberglass models could be made.
In that manner, models of the sun, moon and star stones were produced for the carvers to use.
Another small miracle pertains to the surface finish on the limestone blocks that compose the temple foundation and walls. As workers excavated the construction site, where the original temple once stood, they unearthed two stones that provided examples of both kinds of surface patterns for the stone of the original temple. One is a basket-weave pattern and the other is a vertical striation, or parallel series of minute grooves.
Small miracles
Limestone block from the original temple is known to have been used in a number of structures, such as a small jail built during the city's Icarian period immediately following the exodus of the Latter-day Saints and situated near the present-day Nauvoo City Hall. But none of the block known to exist preserves the basket-weave and striated patterns as do these specimens unearthed during the temple excavation. They gave Elder MacKay and his employees the guidance they needed to custom fashion the chisels that would authentically replicate the patterns on the block for the new temple.
Such small miracles — and others, such as being able to find craftsmen who would do hand work using small chisels and hand-held, air-driven, chipping hammers as opposed to machine fabrication — are combining to make the new Nauvoo Temple a faithful monument to the House of the Lord built in the 1840s by the Lord's covenant people.