The Kanesville Tabernacle was built in three weeks to have a space large enough for a conference for the displaced pioneers to sustain Brigham Young as Church president in December 1847 in the area of Council Bluffs, Iowa.
“It was rough-hewn. It was hastily built. It wasn’t built to last forever,” said President Richard L. Bennett, previously a professor of Church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University and who is leading the Mormon Trail Center at Winter Quarters with his wife, Sister Patricia Bennett. “But what happened there would have a permanent impact on the history of the Church, in that Brigham Young is sustained as the next president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” during a solemn assembly on December 27, 1847.
The event 175 years ago is one of several significant events that happened in Kanesville, President Bennett said.
The Kanesville Tabernacle, one of the first tabernacles built by the Church, lasted a couple of years. It was rebuilt in the mid-1990s and dedicated in 1996 by President Gordon B. Hinckley.
“It was a wonderful effort … to remember and commemorate everything that happened in Council Bluffs,” said President Bennett. However, like the original, “it’s been gradually, continually decaying to the point of no return.”
Read the full story on Church News.