Essential Temple Tee (Nauvoo)

Location
Nauvoo, Illinois. The temple stands at 50 North Wells Street on a high bluff overlooking a bend in the Mississippi River, rebuilt on the same footprint as the original 1846 temple.

Temple Number
The Church's 113th operating temple at its dedication.

Announced
April 4, 1999, by President Gordon B. Hinckley.

Groundbreaking
October 24, 1999. President Gordon B. Hinckley presided. The cornerstone was laid November 5, 2000.

Dedicated
June 27 to June 30, 2002, by President Gordon B. Hinckley, in 13 sessions attended by 19,958 members in Nauvoo and carried by satellite to about 2,300 locations in 72 countries, in 38 languages.

Architecture
FFKR Architecture of Salt Lake City, Roger P. Jackson, principal architect; Legacy Constructors, contractor. The exterior recreates William Weeks's design for the original temple, developed in collaboration with Joseph Smith: limestone quarried in Russellville, Alabama, laid over a reinforced concrete structure, rising 162 feet 5 inches, with approximately 54,000 square feet of floor area.

Ordinance Rooms
Five instruction rooms in a progressive design, a celestial room, six sealing rooms, an assembly room, and a baptistry with the font resting on twelve oxen, duplicating the font of the original temple.

First Temple President
Richard W. Winder, called as the temple's first president for its 2002 opening, with Barbara W. Winder as matron.

• The original temple rose over five hard years: cornerstones laid April 6, 1841, first endowments administered December 10, 1845, and more than 6,000 Latter-day Saints endowed by early February 1846, even as the first wagons rolled west out of the city.
• The Saints dedicated the original as they were leaving it: privately by Joseph Young on April 30, 1846, and publicly the next day, with Orson Hyde offering the first public dedicatory prayer. An arsonist's fire gutted the building on October 9, 1848; the Icarians, a communal group newly arrived in Nauvoo, purchased the temple block in April 1849; a tornado toppled much of the remaining stonework on May 27, 1850.
• President Gordon B. Hinckley announced the rebuild on April 4, 1999, and the new temple was raised on the same footprint as the original building.
• A historical research team of about ten people, chaired by historian Glen M. Leonard, worked from historical drawings and journals; more than 14,000 exterior stones were individually designed, and an average sunstone took 300 hours to carve.
• F. Keith Stepan, managing director of the Church's Temple Construction Department, reported a construction quality evaluation of 99, the highest his department had ever received, and called it the most well-built temple he had worked on.

• Thirty sunstones, carved replicas of the originals, crown the exterior pilasters; each pilaster also carries a moonstone at its base and a starstone above the sunstone.
• Both the temple and its angel Moroni statue face west.
• Stepan estimated the finished reconstruction to be about 95 percent correct to the 1846 original.

• The first dedicatory session began at 6 p.m. on June 27, 2002; President Hinckley noted that the hour corresponded to 5 p.m. in Joseph Smith's era, 158 years, almost to the hour, after the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith at Carthage Jail.
• The coverstone bears the inscription "Originally built 1846. Rebuilt 2002."
• The public open house ran May 6 to June 22, 2002, except Sundays, and drew 331,849 visitors.
• Lightning struck the angel Moroni statue on June 28, 2019; a newly gilded replacement statue was set atop the tower on November 12, 2019.