Battalion center
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.
Construction has commenced on a new Mormon Battalion Visitors Center at This Is The Place Heritage Park in Salt Lake City that will honor the memory of the 1846-47 pioneers who answered the call of Brigham Young to interrupt their exodus from Nauvoo, Ill., and enlist in the United States Army in the war with Mexico.
Elder M. Russell Ballard of the Quorum of the Twelve was among dignitaries who broke ground June 9 for the $3 million facility, which will be located near the Pony Express Monument. Being outside the park's Heritage Village living-history attraction will make it accessible to visitors free of charge.
The first phase of the project calls for two heroic-size statues to be sculpted and surrounded by plazas near the visitors center, said Robert Pettegrew Paul, chairman of the building and fund-raising committee of the Mormon Battalion Association.
Titled "Duty Calls" and "Duty Triumphs," the first sculpture depicts a battalion volunteer in a farewell embrace with his wife and children as President Brigham Young sends him forth. The second depicts several themes, including a chaplain kneeling in prayer and two battalion members assisting a suffering comrade.
The monuments are the work of Steven L. Neal, a physician in Pendleton, Ore., where he is bishop of the Pendleton 2nd Ward.
Phase 2 of the project will be the visitor center itself, and Phase 3 will be the Jesse C. Little Memorial Garden behind the building, including a walkway memorializing various points and events. These include the mustering in at Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1846; the outfitting at Fort Leavenworth, Kans., and points in the 2,000-mile infantry march that lead to San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco in California.
"It's a wonderful thing that we are going to honor the battalion here," Elder Ballard said to the audience at the groundbreaking. "I commend this work and am grateful for it and trust that the Lord will bless us in another great enterprise."
He said that he is worried that the youth of today, caught up in today's technological gadgetry, might lose a sense of historical heritage. "When you think of and study the history of that battalion, what they went through, what they would do for a drink of water, what they went through to fulfill the charge that was given to them by Brigham Young, and to fulfill their responsibility to the United States Army,... we cannot lose that! We must not lose that."
Conducting the program was Ellis Ivory, chairman of the board of directors of This Is the Place. Brother Paul also spoke to the audience, and a group of re-enactors from the association posted the colors, which included the firing of a cannon.
Besides contributing to the colonization of the western United States, the battalion is remembered for its sacrifices that aided the body of the Church in its immigration to and settlement of the Salt Lake Valley. President Young said in February 1855, "The battalion went on and performed their duties and fulfilled their mission, and every person who has the spirit of revelation can see that — to all human appearance — this people must have perished had not these men gone into the service of their country."
E-mail to: rscott@desnews.com
