Essential Temple Tee – with personalizable date (Logan)

Location
Logan, Utah. Nine acres occupying an entire city block on an elevated bench of ancient Lake Bonneville, visible for miles across Cache Valley.

Temple Number
The fourth Latter-day Saint temple built, the second still in operation, and the second dedicated in Utah Territory.

Announced
October 6, 1876, by Brigham Young, at the 46th Semiannual General Conference. Young announced a temple for Cache Valley and divided Utah Territory into three temple districts. A letter that December named Logan as the site.

Groundbreaking
May 18, 1877. Elder Orson Pratt dedicated the site; President John W. Young broke ground. Less than a month after ground was broken at Manti, the first time in Church history that two temple groundbreakings fell in the same year.

Dedicated
May 17–19, 1884, by President John Taylor, in three sessions. The only temple John Taylor ever dedicated. Logan officials tidied the city, organized food and lodging for travelers, and ran excursion trains at reduced fare. About 1,500 people attended the first session.

Rededicated
March 13–15, 1979, by President Spencer W. Kimball, in nine sessions.

Architecture
Truman O. Angell, Church architect. Castellated style, shared with the Manti temple. Charles O. Card served as superintendent of construction, John Parry as master mason, William Davis as plastering foreman. The exterior is dark siliceous limestone, with buff-colored limestone reserved for detailed carving because it worked more easily. Five stories, 168 by 224 feet, 86 feet to the roofline. A domed cupola sits above each short end. The east tower rises 170 feet and the west 165, with four octagonal towers at 100 feet each. Originally 59,130 square feet, now 115,507.

Ordinance Rooms
Four ordinance rooms, eleven sealing rooms, one baptistry, and a celestial room.

First Temple President
Marriner Wood Merrill, 1884–1906. Twenty-two years, still the longest tenure in the temple's history.

• Built largely by volunteer labor. More than $600,000 in time, goods, and cash was donated, and more than 25,000 people worked on the building over seven years.
• Brigham Young died three months after the groundbreaking. John Taylor, who succeeded him, dedicated the finished building seven years later.
• Primary children in the Cache Valley Stake raised about $2,300 in a "nickel drive" for building materials. A guard keeping children off the scaffolding was once talked down by a boy who argued that he had paid his nickel and had a right to see the work. The boy got to stand on the scaffolding.
• Among the volunteers were Sagwitch and roughly 200 Shoshone Saints who had joined the Church eleven years earlier, after surviving the massacre of their people by the United States Army at Bear River. Settled at Washakie on the northern Utah border, the men traveled to Logan in their spare time to haul stone and prepare plaster, donating thousands of hours. About a year after the dedication, Sagwitch and four others spent four days in the finished temple performing ordinances for family members killed at Bear River.

• The castellated form, with battlements, squared towers, and a fortress silhouette, is the visual signature Logan shares with Manti and with almost nothing else in the temple system.
• The exterior was originally painted a pinkish off-white to conceal the dark, rough-hewn limestone underneath. The paint was allowed to weather away in the early 1900s, and the exposed stone became the building's defining feature.
• Rows of arched windows in white frames run the length of both long elevations.

• December 4, 1917: fire broke out on the temple's east side, traced to faulty wiring in a switchboard inside a closet beneath the main stairway. It damaged walls, carpet, furniture, windows, and paintings. Members repaired it in about three months.
• 1976: closed for a complete interior reconstruction. The interior was gutted and the roof removed, leaving only the exterior walls and interior floors. The hand-painted murals and pioneer craftsmanship were lost, and the progressive muraled rooms were replaced with stationary rooms equipped for film. President Kimball, who rededicated the building, regretted the loss.
• 1979: reopened after a public open house that drew 213,184 guests against an expected 90,000. There were 19,205 on the busiest day, with the line stretching seven blocks.
• 2009: grounds renovated. A 1970s water feature gave way to an oval reflecting pool, and heated sidewalks were added for Cache Valley snow.
• April 2019: President Nelson announced that Logan, among other pioneer-era temples, would be renovated. Plans have not been released.

• Between the 1884 dedication and the 1976 closure, 26,258,390 ordinances were performed here, more than 18 percent of all temple work in the Church at that time.
• The first temple built with progressive muraled ordinance rooms for a live-acted endowment presentation.
• One sitting and four future Presidents of the Church spoke at the 1979 rededication: Spencer W. Kimball, Ezra Taft Benson, Howard W. Hunter, Gordon B. Hinckley, and Thomas S. Monson.
• In 1897 a two-story stone barn was built a block east to stable the animals of traveling patrons. Automobiles made it obsolete by the 1910s. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985 and still stands at 368 East 200 North.