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Center Place
A revelation dated July 20, 1831, now Doctrine and Covenants 57, named this as the land for the city of Zion: "the place which is now called Independence is the center place; and a spot for the temple is lying westward, upon a lot which is not far from the courthouse."

Buying In
Bishop Edward Partridge bought 63.27 acres west of town from Jones and Clara Flournoy on December 19, 1831, including the ground set apart for the temple. Between 1831 and 1833 the Church bought 180 acres in Independence and 1,200 elsewhere in Jackson County, and some 1,200 Saints gathered to the county.

After 1833
The Saints held on to their deeds after they were driven out, hoping the state or federal government would help them get their land back. Those efforts failed. In 1904 the Church bought 25 acres here, part of it from Partridge's original purchase.

• August 3, 1831: Eight elders met on a lot west of the courthouse. Sidney Rigdon dedicated the ground, Joseph Smith laid a stone at the northeast corner of the planned temple, and someone read from Psalm 87. A day earlier, about 12 miles west in Kaw Township, Rigdon had dedicated the land of Zion for the gathering.
• June 1832: William W. Phelps printed the first issue of The Evening and the Morning Star, on a press he had bought in Cincinnati and hauled west. It was the only religious newspaper in Jackson County.
• June 1833: The First Presidency, then in Kirtland, sent a plat for the City of Zion. It put 24 temples at the center of town, each to carry the words "Holiness to the Lord."
• July 1833: Phelps ran an article in the Star on the Missouri laws that restricted free Black people, and advised the few Black Church members moving to Zion to act with care. Missouri was a slave state. Many residents read the article as an invitation for free Black converts to come, and town leaders feared it would encourage enslaved people to seek freedom. Phelps printed a leaflet backing away from it, but the leaders called a meeting at the courthouse for July 20.
• July 20, 1833: At that meeting Samuel Lucas, a county judge, and twelve other men demanded that the Star stop printing and the Saints leave the county. When Church leaders would not agree, a mob pulled down the printing office, threw the press out the upper window and scattered the type in the street. Bishop Partridge and Charles Allen were tarred and feathered on the public square. Mary Elizabeth Rollins, 15, and her sister Caroline, 13, grabbed armfuls of unbound pages of the Book of Commandments and hid with them in a cornfield.
• November 1833: After violence started again on October 31, three people were killed in a clash near the Big Blue River on November 4, one of them a Church member. The next day the militia disarmed nearly 150 Saints, and families began crossing the Missouri River into Clay County.

1. The temple lot, about 300 by 200 feet of grass on one of the highest points in town, is owned today by the Church of Christ (Temple Lot), whose meetinghouse stands beside it. Community of Christ's temple and headquarters are across the street. Just southeast of the lot is the Independence Visitors' Center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Ground was broken on June 1, 1966, and N. Eldon Tanner dedicated it in 1971. A short walk west is the Flournoy House, the brick home Jones Flournoy built in 1826. Locals moved it four blocks in 1989 to save it from a parking lot, and it now sits on Community of Christ's Heritage Plaza.
2. A bronze plaque near the square marks where the printing office stood. The Book of Commandments was nearly finished when it was destroyed. The Gilbert and Whitney store stood just north of it. The two-story red brick store doubled as the bishop's storehouse, and it was ransacked in July 1833.

• The courthouse that section 57 uses as a landmark is gone. It was replaced in 1836 by the building now called the Truman Courthouse.
• A conference in November 1831 voted to print 10,000 copies of the Book of Commandments. In April 1832 the run was cut to 3,000, probably to match the paper on hand. Fewer than three dozen copies of the 1833 book are known today.
• The book was set in brevier, a type about 8 points high, and its pages measure roughly 4½ by 3 inches.