The Church History Museum is the fourth in a pedigree of downtown Salt Lake City museums owned or supervised by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In 1869, John W. Young, a son of LDS Church President Brigham Young, opened the Salt Lake City Museum and Menagerie just west of the Lion House. Besides artifacts featured inside the small adobe house, the museum included wildlife outside, including a cage full of monkeys.
The museum relocated for the first of several times in the early 1870s and soon dropped the zoo-like exhibits. Ownership passed to the LDS Church for the first time in 1878.
In 1885, a citizens group assumed the museum and its collections, renaming it the Deseret Museum. Six years later, James E. Talmage was hired as museum curator — a position he held for two decades until his call as an LDS apostle — with the assistance of fellow future LDS apostle J. Reuben Clark Jr. in the early years.
The museum and collections — including an extensive library — took a marked direction toward natural history and gained global respect. In 1903, the church resumed supervision as the museum continued to bounce around to several locations.
Eventually, the LDS history and art collections were relocated in 1918 to Temple Square's newly expanded Bureau of Information, a visitors center precursor. Other collection segments were transferred to Brigham Young University, the University of Utah and the Daughters of Utah Pioneers.
In 1976, the Temple Square exhibits were boxed and stored as the LDS Church prepared for a new visitors center as well as the separate Church Museum of History and Art in 1984.
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