This week in Church history
E-mail story
It's easy. Send a link to the story you were just reading to a friend. Just fill out the form on this page and we'll send it along.
Your name and e-mail address are transmitted to the recipient. Otherwise, it is considered private information; see Privacy policy.
150 years ago
President Brigham Young attended a meeting at Elder John Taylor's home on Feb. 11, 1845, to consider damming the Mississippi River sufficiently enough to propel machinery via hydro-power, according to History of the Church 7:372.
He met with a Committee of the Agricultural and Manufacturing Society and it was "proposed that the citizens [of Nauvoo, Ill.] be invited to subscribe 12,000 days work, which it was estimated would put a sufficient dam in the Mississippi to propel machinery."
In an unrelated matter, a Feb. 11 letter penned by President Young to Elder Wilford Woodruff said the stone baptismal font was about to be erected in the Nauvoo Temple, and that the building's "woodwork is progressing rapidly under a temporary roof in the basement story, and we hope to commence the endowments next fall or early in the winter. We will not send many elders to England until after the endowment. . . .
"The Saints are more engaged than ever to finish the temple, and it is desirable that tithings be forwarded from all branches at the earliest safe convenience."
Also on Feb. 11, John C. Elliott, "one of the murderers of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, was arrested by John Kay."
Quote from the past
"One has to have experience with sorrow and pain in order to feel happiness in joy and health. To gain experience is one of the great objects of life, and the way in which one accepts the various situations of life shows progress or retrogression." - Lucy Grant Cannon, Young Woman's Journal 40:410, August 1929.
