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Then and Now
Between late 1836 and 1839 as many as five thousand Saints made homes in and around Far West. Today farmland surrounds the temple site, which marks the center of what was once a large city.

A County for the Saints
In 1836, three years after the expulsion from Jackson County, the Missouri legislature created Caldwell County in a thinly settled part of the state, meaning it as a place for Latter-day Saints to live. The Saints bought land and laid out Far West on the plat drawn up for the City of Zion.

Headquarters, 1838
Joseph and Emma Smith and their three children arrived on March 14, 1838, and Far West served as Church headquarters until that November. Seven revelations now in the Doctrine and Covenants came to Joseph Smith here, including the law of tithing on July 8.

• April 26, 1838: A revelation, now section 115, gave the Church its full name: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It called Far West "a holy and consecrated land," commanded a temple, and set the Fourth of July as the day to begin.
• July 4, 1838: Joseph Smith Sr. and a small military unit led a parade to the town square, where the Saints raised a flag on a tall pole and stood around the excavated temple site while workers set the four cornerstones. Thousands watched. Sidney Rigdon gave the day's speech.
• October 31, 1838: After two weeks of armed fighting in northern Missouri and Governor Lilburn W. Boggs's order to drive the Saints from the state, militia under Major General Samuel D. Lucas surrounded the city. Joseph Smith and other leaders were arrested just outside town and later jailed to await trial. No more work was done on the temple.
• January 29, 1839: With Joseph in jail, Brigham Young asked the Saints in Far West to covenant to help one another leave the state, and a committee was named to organize it. Most went east to Illinois. By late April only a handful of leaders and a few families were left.
• April 26, 1839: Section 118 had told the Twelve to leave for England from the temple site on this date. Brigham Young and other apostles rode into the nearly empty town on the moonlit night of April 25, met at the site around daybreak, sang a hymn, and ordained Wilford Woodruff and George A. Smith as apostles.

1. Shoal Creek runs about a mile north of the temple site. The town stood on high rolling prairie between this creek and Goose Creek.
2. The Far West Temple Site is a fenced plot with a monument and the four cornerstones laid in 1838. It takes up part of the town's old public square, four acres that also held a schoolhouse used as town hall, courthouse and meetinghouse. There is no visitors' center, and most people spend about half an hour.
3. Goose Creek runs a little over a mile south of the temple site, on the far side of the old town from Shoal Creek.

• Before it was Far West, the settlement went by Shoal Creek.
• By 1838 the town had about 150 houses, four dry-goods stores, six blacksmith shops, two hotels, at least two schoolhouses, and a printing office that put out the Elders' Journal.
• For the 1839 ordinations, Alpheus Cutler, the temple's master workman, rolled a large stone to the southeast corner of the site. Wilford Woodruff sat on it to be ordained, then George A. Smith took his place. Afterward Cutler rolled the stone back to where he had found it.