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Church Years
1839 to 1846. Nauvoo was Church headquarters from the move out of Missouri until the exodus west.

Before the Saints
Commerce, a small town on the Mississippi. The Church began buying land there on April 30, 1839, including a large tract from Isaac Galland. The ground was low and wet. Malaria swept through the first settlers in the summer of 1839, and the Saints set to draining the swamps.

At Its Height
One of the largest cities in Illinois. How large depends on which Church source you read: nearly 10,000 people, or about 15,000 by 1846.

The Name
The post office became Nauvoo on April 21, 1840. A First Presidency proclamation of January 15, 1841 said the name "is of Hebrew origin, and signifies a beautiful situation, or place, carrying with it, also, the idea of rest."

• December 16, 1840: Illinois approved the Nauvoo charter, which gave the city its own council, a university and a militia. Joseph Smith served as mayor from 1842 until his death.
• April 6, 1841: The temple cornerstones were laid on the Church's eleventh anniversary, with Joseph Smith directing the southeast stone.
• March 17, 1842: Joseph Smith organized the Relief Society in the Red Brick Store, with Emma Smith as its first president.
• April 7, 1844: At general conference, prompted by the death of King Follett in a well-digging accident, Joseph Smith preached to a crowd of about 20,000 on the divine nature and potential of God's children.
• June 27, 1844: Joseph and Hyrum Smith were killed at Carthage Jail. Their bodies came home to Nauvoo, and about 10,000 people filed past them at the Mansion House.
• February 4, 1846: The first wagons rolled down Parley Street to the ferry. By March 1 about 2,000 Saints had crossed into Iowa, and over 14,000 left Nauvoo that year. The temple was dedicated on May 1, 1846.
• September 1846: Several hundred armed men attacked the Saints and others still defending the city. At least three died, and once a neutral committee negotiated an end to the fighting, the last few hundred Saints were forced out.

1. The Homestead, on Water Street, is the log home Joseph and Emma moved into in May 1839. Joseph, Emma and Hyrum are buried in the family cemetery beside it. The Smiths moved into the Mansion House, at Main and Water, on August 31, 1843. It doubled as a hotel, and Emma lived there until 1871. The Nauvoo House, also on Main Street, was the guest house an 1841 revelation called for. It was still unfinished in 1844, when Joseph and Hyrum were first buried beneath it.
2. The original temple stood on the bluff at Wells Street. The rebuilt Nauvoo Illinois Temple sits on the same site and was dedicated on June 27, 2002.
3. The Relief Society got its start in the parlor of the Hiram and Sarah Granger Kimball Home. In 1842 Margaret Cook, a seamstress who worked for Sarah, wanted to sew shirts for the men building the temple. The two women talked about a sewing society, and days later about a dozen women from the neighborhood met in the house.
4. Down on Water Street, the Red Brick Store is where the Relief Society was organized, and Joseph Smith first gave the endowment in its upper room on May 4, 1842.
5. The West Grove, down the hill from the temple, was one of the outdoor spots where the Saints met while the temple was going up. Joseph Smith spoke there to the Relief Society on August 31, 1842, about what he had learned by revelation on baptism for the dead. Minutes often say only "the grove," so for many sermons nobody can tell which grove it was. The old trees were cut for firewood and lumber after 1846. The exact spot isn't known; the marker shows the grove the Church replanted west of the temple in 2015.
6. The Brigham and Mary Ann Young Home, on Kimball Street, was the family's second house in Nauvoo. The first was an unfinished log cabin. They moved into the brick home on May 31, 1843, and Brigham met there with the other apostles.
7. The Seventies Hall on Parley Street was dedicated in seven sessions, from Christmas Day 1844 to New Year's Day 1845. Church leaders met there to plan the move west. The hall was torn down by 1869 and rebuilt on its original foundation in 1972.
8. Parley Street is the road the wagons took down to the river landing in 1846. Today it is called the Trail of Hope, and it ends at the Mississippi beside the Pioneer Memorial.

• The coffins at Joseph and Hyrum's public funeral held sandbags, for fear enemies would desecrate the bodies. Months after the real burial under the Nauvoo House, the brothers were moved again, to the Homestead.
• The Articles of Faith come from a summary of beliefs Joseph Smith published in Nauvoo, in the Times and Seasons of March 1, 1842.
• The rebuilt temple's dedication began at 6 p.m. daylight time on June 27, the 158th anniversary of the martyrdom. Adjusted for daylight saving, that was the same hour as the killings at Carthage.
• Fire gutted the empty temple at about 3 a.m. on October 9, 1848. French Icarian settlers acquired the shell to make a school, until a tornado in May 1850 brought down the north wall. The limestone went into cellars and buildings around town.