With a palette of red, gold, orange, green and brown hues, nature has adorned the Wasatch Mountains surrounding the Salt Lake Valley. And though the exhibition is an annual event, this season it is more glorious than usual, due, meteorologists say, to a season of drought followed by a brief period of heavy rain and cooler temperatures.
Nowhere are the colors more dazzling than at the Temple Quarry Nature Trail in Little Cottonwood Canyon east of Sandy. Here it was that the pioneers quarried the rock from which the walls of the Salt Lake Temple were constructed.
A visit to the historic quarry, easily accessed and traversed over a paved trail, brings to mind that it was 150 years ago that construction commenced on the temple, though the quarrying in Little Cottonwood Canyon would not begin for a few years. Excavation for the foundation began Feb. 21, 1853, and progressed in time for the cornerstones to be laid the following April 6, the 23rd anniversary of the organization of the Church.
It was at general conference the previous Oct. 9 that President Heber C. Kimball, first counselor in the First Presidency, put a motion before the body that the Church "build a temple of the best materials that can be furnished in the mountains of North America, and that the Presidency dictate where the stone and other materials shall be obtained; and that the Presidency shall be untrammeled from this time hence forth and forever." The motion was carried unanimously.
At the same conference, President Brigham Young displayed some of his characteristic candor and wry wit. "It has been moved, seconded, and carried by the Conference," he said, "that we build a temple of the best material that America affords. If this is done, it will have to be of platina [platinum]. . . . If we cannot get the platina, we must build a temple of pure gold; that is here, I know. But if the Conference want us to build a temple of pure gold, they will have to put into the tithing stores something besides old half-dead stinking cows, and old broken-kneed horses."
Then, not giving it as anything other than his opinion, President Young extolled at length the virtues of adobe as a building material, positing that it would outlast the rock from Sanpete County or nearby Red Butte Canyon, both of which had been suggested as possibilities.
It is apparent that President Young's theory in this regard did not coincide with the mind of the Lord. Within five years, it was determined that "granite" rock from Little Cottonwood Canyon would be used for the temple walls, even though the Red Butte sandstone was initially used for the foundation but then replaced. In fact, Apostle Wilford Woodruff, himself a future Church president, would recall in an Aug. 1, 1880, address at Logan, Utah, "Before we came to the Rocky Mountains, I had a dream. I dreamed of being in these mountains and of seeing a large fine looking temple erected in one of these valleys which was built of cut granite stone. . . . When the foundation of that temple was laid I thought of my dream and a great many times since. And whenever President Young held a council of the brethren of the Twelve and talked of building the temple of adobe or brick, which was done, I would say to myself, 'No, you will never do it,' because I had seen it in my dream built of some other material. I mention these things to show you that things are manifested to the Latter-day Saints sometimes which we do not know anything about, only as they are given by the Spirit of God."
Today, the Temple Quarry Trail is administered by the U.S. Forest Service as part of the Wasatch-Cache National Forest. A paved path of three-tenths mile makes a shady loop where granite boulders can still be seen and touched. Some bear the obvious marks of quarrying more than a century ago: half-circle grooves where workmen pounded chisel-point drill bits into the rock, then forced wedges into the holes to split the stone.
A marker placed by the Church in 1994 gives the history of the quarry and the temple construction. It notes that transporting the rock to the temple site — using ox or mule teams and, later, attempting barges on a canal — was a painfully slow process until the 1870s, when it could be hauled on flatcars from a railroad station in Sandy.
Forest Service markers give interesting information. For example, the stone in the quarry, technically speaking, is not granite, although its salt-and-pepper spots make it appear so. It is actually quartz monzonite, nicknamed "white granite" or, because of its use in the temple construction, "temple granite."
The Church marker notes that material from the quarry has been used for other structures such as the Utah State Capitol Building and "This Is the Place Monument." Had the marker been placed more recently, it might have indicated that rock from the quarry was used for construction of the Conference Center, dedicated in 2000.
The Temple Stone Quarry is reached by heading due east on 9400 South in Sandy. It is near the base of the canyon on the south side of the road, not far past the intersection with Wasatch Boulevard.
E-mail: rscott@desnews.com
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