Burned chapel full of history

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Besides the brick and mortar engulfed by flames, a piece of Mormon history went up in smoke during a recent fire at the LDS chapel just south of Harvard Square.One of the first LDS chapels in New England, the building was dedicated by President David O. McKay in 1956 and housed distinguished parishioners from President Boyd K. Packer to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney to President Henry B. Eyring.Historian Claudia Bushman fondly recalled the sacrifice and struggle it took to erect the building after local members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were asked to raise as much as 50 percent of the funds needed to build the chapel. Members hosted community suppers, fundraising drives and Relief Society sewing projects.\"We had no money. We were really hard up,\" Bushman said in an interview. \"We all did adore the building because we put blood into it. ... It really signaled the great success of our congregation and our religion in New England at the time. For it to be such a dramatic and ambitious building was something that brought us all a great deal of pride.\"Bushman, wife of prominent Columbia University historian Richard Bushman, who also lived in the area, said some local Cambridge residents were suspicious of Mormons and were not pleased about the prospect of a nearby chapel.__IMAGE1__Elder Clayton M. Christensen, an Area Authority Seventy and a professor at Harvard Business School, said neighbors tried to block the sale of land for the chapel (the property was part of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's estate) by convincing the real estate agent to demand a $50,000 payment within 24 hours.Elder Levi Edgar Young called on the three or four stalwart LDS families in the branch who had nowhere near that kind of money. Afterward, a nervous Elder Young wrote out a personal check from an account that didn't have the money either, and the real estate agent called Zions Bank to verify the payment. Orville Adams of Zions Bank in Salt Lake City responded to the cold call by guaranteeing the check once he found out its intended purpose, and the Mormons were able to obtain the land.Despite obstacles, the building was finished within several years, and a branch eventually became a ward, and today three singles wards shared the building at Longfellow Park. Bushman and her family left the Cambridge area in 1960 and returned eight years later and admired how the church had grown over that time. Today, 16 wards and branches make up what was once the geographic area of the Cambridge branch.\"The LDS scene in Cambridge changed a great deal between our two sojourns,\" said Bushman, remarking on the area's growth during a 2007 commemorative celebration marking the 51st anniversary of the building in 2007. \"L. Tom Perry was an innovative stake president and we did many special things in our stake.\"__IMAGE2__Christensen said several of the current members of Quorum of the Twelve and many members of the Quorums of the Seventy spent time in the Cambridge chapel, either as students or leaders. Those include President Eyring, the first counselor in the First Presidency, who was a doctoral student at Harvard and Elder Russell M. Nelson, of the Quorum of the Twelve, received medical training at Harvard Medical School. Both men attended church at the Cambridge chapel.When the LDS population in the Cambridge area grew enough to warrant a new chapel in nearby Belmont, Mass., Romney, then a private businessman, was bishop of the Cambridge ward, which was housed in the Cambridge building along with five other congregational units.\"Boy it was crowded,\" Christensen said of that time in 1984. \"I remember thinking there had been more truth taught in that building than in any other building in the New England, which is home to Yale, Harvard, MIT and other prominent universities. This really is a sacred place.\"An electrical malfunction triggered a fire that ravaged the Cambridge chapel during stake conference May 17. For now, LDS members are worshiping in the nearby First Church, a United Church of Christ congregation that began in 1636 and is one of the oldest religious bodies in America.\"It seems if there's a silver lining in this tragedy is that there might be an opportunity to build new relationships that we would not otherwise,\" said Daniel Smith, UCC senior minister. \"It's our own way of responding to God's call to offer hospitality to our neighbors in need.\"Cambridge Stake President Gordon Low told LDS members gathered in the comparatively ornate and cavernous UCC May 24 that plans are under way to begin rebuilding the structure within the surviving brick structure. Trying to build outside the frame could generate tortuous legal battleslegal issues that could stymie the rebuilding process, said Low, who anticipates rebuilding within the existing framework will take about one year.\"We obviously want to maintain the history of the building,\" Low said. \"But now we can reconfigure the building to make it more efficient for single adults.\"