Valiant apostle's historic home to be replicated at pioneer park
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.
On the This Is the Place Monument at the mouth of Emigration Canyon in Salt Lake City, one of the figures depicted in bronze standing with President Brigham Young atop the 60-foot granite pylon is apostle Heber C. Kimball. A confidant of President Young and a valiant Church leader in his own right, Elder Kimball would become one of President Young's counselors in the First Presidency, reorganized five months after President Young and the Pioneers first entered the Salt Lake Valley July 24, 1847.
Now, Elder Kimball's 19th Century downtown Salt Lake City home is being replicated at Old Deseret Village, the living-history attraction adjacent to the monument at This Is the Place Heritage Park. (It was approximately at the park's location that President Young gazed upon the valley and, according to tradition, uttered the now-famous phrase "This is the right place.")
Scores of Kimball descendants gathered for a family reunion June 17 at the park, where they broke ground for the recreation of the Kimball home. Project chairman Stan Kimball conducted the ceremony, and John Gidney, financial secretary of the Heber C. Kimball Family Organization, read Elder Kimball's address to his children.
In part, the address reads: "I want you to remember that inasmuch as you honor your father, when you become old and are engaged in the ministry you shall be honored. The Gospel of Jesus Christ as revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith is true; I know it, for God has revealed it to me. . . . All the ordinances are signs of things in the heavens. I want my children to observe these things, for we have come into a dispensation when we have got to open a door to receive all the dispensations of old."
Dressed in the likeness of his illustrious ancestor, family president Mark Watson gave a dedicatory prayer at the site.
Ardeth G. Kapp, vice chairwoman of This Is the Place Foundation and a former Church Young Women general president, gave remarks.
"A ground breaking is at the very heart and symbolic of the pioneering spirit," she said. "It symbolizes vision, an idea or a dream that is to become a reality."
Being built with donated funds, the Kimball home reconstruction is one of many park improvements and additions scheduled this year and is to be completed in June 2001.
E-mail: rscott@desnews.com
