Kirtland Temple

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Kirtland Temple today

The Kirtland Temple is the oldest and original temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and continues to serve the fellowship of Christ as a church to this day . It was built from 1833 to 1836 in Kirtland , Ohio near the shores of Lake Erie , on what is now the edge of the greater Cleveland area . The temple has been listed as a building on the National Register of Historic Places since June 1969 . In December 1976, it was granted National Historic Landmark status.

The assembly room on the ground floor, with stucco work and hand-carved pulpits and columns
East facade and architectural details
North facade and tower
cut
West facade and architectural details

building

The temple is a three-story building in the style of early Victorian architecture , combining elements of the Federal Style with neoclassicism and neo-Gothic details.

construction

The rectangular floor plan is 18 × 24 m, the building is oriented in an east-west direction with the entrance to the east. The ridge is crowned by a turret with an octagonal lantern and a dome-shaped dome. The outer walls are erected unusual for the time and the region of sandstone, with a circulating under the roof Friesen provided facade is plastered. Shards of crushed glass and porcelain were originally incorporated into the white exterior plaster in order to glisten in the sunlight and serve as decoration in the church. The corners of the building and the bezels of the doors and the ogival windows are designed with hewn stones. The gable surfaces and the turret are made of wood in a frame construction . They are planked with wooden slats and painted white. The roof was originally covered with handmade wooden shingles. They are not received

Above a functionless basement to compensate for the slight incline, there are two floors, each with a meeting room that takes up almost the entire floor. The ground floor is known as the Church Floor , the upper floor as the Apostolic Floor . The attic was divided into five school rooms that span the full width of the building and each have a dormer window per roof area.

Furnishing

The furnishings in the meeting rooms reflect the beliefs of early Mormonism . For the two levels of the priesthood , the Aaronic and the higher Melchizedek Priesthood, nine raised pulpits are built on each of the two narrow sides . The pews are designed so that the worshipers can switch between facing the east and west.

Pulpits, benches, pillars and the furnishings of the stairwell are handcrafted from local hardwoods and embedded in white. The pillars and pulpits are decorated with carvings, the ceiling edges and windows are decorated with stucco .

history

The followers of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805–1844) and the Church of Christ, which he founded in Upstate New York in 1830 (from 1838: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - for short: Church of Jesus Christ LDS) gathered from 1832 on the edge of the westward advancing settlement border. They wanted to establish a new community based on the beliefs that Smith had sought to receive in revelation since he was fifteen . Smith and his most important followers had fled to Kirtland, near the Great Lakes , shortly after the Church was organized . This was initially intended as a stopover, for Smith already put out his feelers to Missouri : in the local town of Independence they planned to found their Zion ; a building site for a future main temple has already been acquired and consecrated there. However, since the construction in Independence failed due to various political and economic obstacles, Smith concentrated a few years later on Kirtland again, and planning began there for a somewhat more modest temple. Run by Smith community saw itself as a restoration movement, according to the revelations of Jesus Christ , the primitive Christianity revived.

The Kirtland Temple itself was built by them as the first Assembly Building and March 27, 1836. ordained . It was designed for around 1000 members, but the number of members was exceeded shortly after completion.

The services were held on the ground floor, the hall on the upper floor was used for the training of priests and the training of missionaries . The attic classrooms housed the Kirtland High School and Church offices. In the evenings, the various colleges of the Church gathered here.

In the year after the temple was completed, the financial collapse of the church's own bank, the Kirtland Safety Society, created tension in the religious and civil community. Most of the relatives moved with Joseph Smith to Missouri, first to Independence, then on to Far West , where Smith was imprisoned for several months, and finally in 1839 to Nauvoo in the initially more tolerant state of Illinois . In Nauvoo, Smith fundamentally reshaped the beliefs of the Church, he introduced multiple marriage and the baptism of the dead , and completely changed the rituals in the temple according to the models of the Masons . Around 100 devotees stayed in Kirtland and continued to use the temple according to the original traditions.

Joseph Smith was imprisoned there again in 1844; he was ambushed and murdered by a lynch mob in Carthage , Illinois prison ; the community finally split. The vast majority moved across the Rocky Mountains under Brigham Young's leadership and founded the city of Salt Lake City and the state of Deseret - later Utah . Most of those remaining in Illinois, Missouri, and Kirtland organized themselves into the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1860 onwards, under the direction of Smith's Kirtland-born son Joseph Smith III, without the Nauvoo reforms.

The temple in Kirtland was only used sporadically by the few Mormons in the region, but served the community for a variety of public purposes. Community meetings, schools, music events filled the rooms.

The church in Utah was under strong political pressure because of the multiple marriage, which is why it officially gave it up in 1890. Meanwhile, the Reorganized Church in Ohio was litigating for ownership of the Kirtland Temple and was recognized as the successor in title of the original Smith Church in 1880 . She was awarded the temple and most of Smith's papers. The Reorganized Church was renamed Fellowship of Christ in 2001.

The temple today

The temple is owned by the community of Christ and is used as a place of worship. It is (unlike the temples of the Church of Jesus Christ LDS) open to the public and can be visited. It has been recognized as a National Historic Landmark since 1977, and a small museum has been showing the history of the religious community and the building since 2007.

Web links

Commons : Kirtland Temple  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kirtland Temple in the National Register Information System. National Park Service , accessed February 5, 2020.
  2. ↑ Listing of National Historic Landmarks by State: Ohio. National Park Service , accessed February 5, 2020.

Coordinates: 41 ° 37 ′ 31 ″  N , 81 ° 21 ′ 44 ″  W.