By necessity, early Mormons were builders. It’s easy to forget, retrospectively, how much sheer labor went into the communities that early Latter-day Saints, time and again, built from the ground up. Temple building is one of the more conspicuous form of construction activity, but with each relocation Latter-day Saints also faced anew the more mundane labors of improving land, building homes, outbuildings, ditches and canals, fences, roads—in other words, of generating a basic domestic and civic infrastructure. Not unlike many other roving families in early America, Mormons continually reconstructed their material world from the ground up.
