Previously: The Hidden History of Music
Welcome readers to part twelve of my current series called "This is the Place.” In this post, I'll be covering Utah's Classy Lady (The Hotel Utah, later changed to the Joseph Smith Memorial Building).
Utah's Classy Lady: The Hotel Utah (Built in 2 years; 1909-1911)
As you can see, there doesn't appear to much excavating going on at all. Why would they use men with shovels and pick axes and wagons to haul off material when steam shovels were also said to be in use at this time in history? This photo isn't the greatest quality, but if you can zoom in and look around you'll notice that all the wagons are empty, totally devoid of dirt. It looks like just a bunch of horses standing around with a few men leaning over a shovel.
Typical of these types of old photos, we don't see any construction workers at all. All we see is a small group of well-dressed people in the bottom-left corner acting like they are in a totally different place. And as usual, we see the vanilla skies in the background.
The St. Francis Hotel was constructed in 1850 in less than a year. The building operated for less than a year when it was destroyed in a fire in 1850. It was rebuilt in one year in 1904, right before the 1906 earthquake and rebuilt after the earthquake, we are told, using the exact same materials. (p. 220)
Scroll back up and take another look at the St. Francis Hotel, do you really think it was possible to build that behemoth structure in less than one year in 1850? And does it make any sense that it would burn down and not be rebuilt until 1904, again in one year? And then rebuilt again, in one year, after the 1906 earthquake, out of its own rubble?
The Flood Building was also built in only one year, from 1903 to 1904. According to the narrative it survived the great earthquake of 1906. The Deseret Evening News article, which I will quote at length later on in this post, vaguely suggests that Jones built the original steel frame for it. (More on Jones and San Francisco later).
In the city of Manti, half of the houses are vacant; there are houses enough empty there to accommodate fifty or a hundred families. In Iron County also there are similar advantages...
We shall thus travel back and forth, and live about as much in one place as in another; for the future we shall keep on the move, going to and fro, and shall never be easy; we never want to be, nor that you should, until the kingdom of God prevails over this earth. We will fill up these mountains, take up the land, and, as they used to say in the States, "become squatters," and we will will become thicker on the mountains than the crickets ever were. (Journal of Discourses; Volume 1, pp. 295-96)
Tell me dear readers, whose houses were they occupying? Are we to believe that Utah pioneers traveled to Manti, 124 miles south of Salt Lake City, built houses, and then abandoned them within five years? Kimball declared that "similar advantages" were to be had in Iron County, which is even farther south, over 200 miles away from Salt Lake City.
This makes entirely no sense at all, unless of course there were abandoned buildings and homes left over from a previous civilization that were ripe for the taking.
It's also interesting that Kimball used the word squatter, which literally means "a person who unlawfully occupies an uninhabited building or unused land." Kimball speaks as if this term was bandied about commonly in those days by all Americans, as if it was common to find abandoned homes throughout the country.
I have to thank Jon Levi for the above reference in the Journal of Discourses. A friend sent it to him and he presented it in this recent video, skip to around 13 minutes for his report on the reference:
Getting back to the Hotel Utah, a structure I definitely believe existed when Brigham and crew rolled into Salt Lake Valley, I found this newspaper photo of the structure "under construction" very interesting:
The man standing just to the left of the crane hook is supposedly "Dick" Jones himself. Notice the other men having that same Charlie Chapman look that we see in scores of other "construction" photos of old buildings. Also notice the date, February 5 of 1910, only 8 months from when ground was supposedly broken for the hotel (According to Arrington, construction began on June 1 of 1909), and the work had already progressed far beyond steel work, yet that's what we're told Jones was doing.
Again, this doesn't make any sense at all. Also notice that the shape of the building itself looks nothing like the Hotel Utah that we see today. Compared to the photo below the image in the article looks like it is only one wing of the hotel, and a much shorter wing at that:
Again, we have to ask, who builds this way? Who builds an entire finished structure and then adds to the top of it?
Scroll back up to the steel frame photograph that I shared earlier in this post and compare it to the Deseret Evening News photo. You'll notice a glaringly obvious size and shape discrepancy. The steel frame actually looks like the shape of the hotel, the other does not.
These anomalies are easy to find in almost every narrative of old buildings similar to the Hotel Utah. It is impossible for all those involved in writing scripts (whether they are using AI or real people to write them) covering up true history to be completely consistent in their stories. This is the weakness of those who endeavor to cover the earth with lies, they leave breadcrumb clues everywhere they go.
The problem however is that people refuse to question narratives that are just "too big to fail." Small lies are easy to scrutinize, but big lies involving the covering up of true history are much easier to get away with. Adolf Hitler, a master propagandist, actually said the following, and just think about this in reference to this massive cover up of old buildings:
In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.
Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. (Mein Kampf, vol. 1, ch. X, quoted in D. Christian Markham, There are Save Two Churches Only, p. 158, emphasis added)
In the research of old world buildings, there are "traces" of the big lie that can be picked up in every narrative. After you've looked into so many building narratives it becomes like clockwork, finding anomaly after anomaly, distortion after distortion, and flat out lie after lie.
But who is going to believe it?
Who is going to say, "oh that's interesting, maybe I'll look into it"? No, the first reaction is to think that such a lie is too massive to pull off, and that the pilgrims, the pioneers, the Indians, the mountain men... someone would have said something. Someone would've have said, "Holy shit, there is a massive abandoned building there!"
And as soon as this thought crosses the mind, the theory is put to rest, and the researchers who look into it are labeled as conspiracy quacks.
Yet, which of you was there a century (or two) ago when these buildings were said to have been built? Who actually witnessed it? Anyone now living? No, so we are left to study the records of those who went before us. But how do we know they weren't tampered with, destroyed, or outright fabricated? How can we trust whoever controlled the records to show us the truth? How do we know that they had our best interests at heart and were only concerned with reporting facts?
Honestly, we don't. If we weren't there ourselves to witness a thing, there is no way of knowing for sure what actually transpired. This, unfortunately, is the state of the world we now reside in, a world covered in gross lies and falsehoods, a world that groans under darkness.
And what has been revealed about human nature is that the natural disposition of almost all men is to abuse power and gratify their vain ambition. The abuse of power and gratifying of ambition are more easily accomplished when the truth is hidden from the masses. This should tell us something about the world we reside in: truth, or things as they really are, were, and will be, is the absolute nemesis of the powers that be. It is the first casualty in the war for our minds, and as you've probably heard many times before, the victors always get to re-write history.
I know many of you believe that a false script for Joseph Smith's supposed practice of polygamy has been written by the LDS Church, manufactured out of whole cloth with zero contemporary evidence. There are some good folks doing some great work on this subject right now, bringing the truth to light and clearing Joseph's, Hyrum's, and Emma's good names. The polygamy narrative is a great example of an organization changing the historical narrative to bolster authority and power that they never received from God. It's a perfect example of the victors (in this case those who took over the organization after the succession crises) re-writing history.
If you apply this same logic to old world buildings, you find the same pattern repeated. A pattern that I believe repeats in different cycles of creation, or "doing that which has been done on other worlds." I believe that we have been placed in a world that is mostly saturated with lies as a test to see how much we love the truth. Are we content to digest what the victors feed us, or do we long for something more? Can we feel that something is wrong with our narratives, and our we willing to follow the Spirit of Truth into whatever abyss it leads us to?
Sometimes the lies are so obvious that it's actually funny. The image below found in the Deseret Evening News supposedly taken during the winter of 1910 is a ridiculously fake insult to intelligence:
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The first giveaway is the vanilla sky and the 3 large smudges in the top-right corner, the second is that the men standing on the car appear to be drawn in with ink. According to the article, the Jones Company is using their crane to hoist up a Hupmobile 150 feet in the air. The article states that the "photograph is an actual reproduction, showing the steel work under construction of the mammoth Hotel Utah..." But hold on a minute, I only see one piece of steel and a few wooden poles, and this is February of 1910, the same month that the Deseret Evening News article I shared earlier showed a photo of a finished wing of the hotel.
What the hell is going on here?
In my opinion, nothing at all. No construction whatsoever, because it was already there. Just take a moment and scroll through this gallery of photos of the Hotel Utah and ask yourselves if the cartoonish-like stooges portrayed in the headliner photos above seem capable of this kind of elaborate work:
As many as 550 men had worked on the building each day. Construction had required 3,700 tons of steel, 3.5 million bricks, 25,000 barrels of cement, 10,000 yards of concrete, and 400,000 square feet of partition tile, with twenty miles of piping to link the network of plumbing and heating. The use of "white" granite and the porcelained pure-white terra-cotta had given the structure one of the most brilliant facades in the nation. (The Hotel, p. 18)
My, my, that's quite a tall order... and in only two years no less... very impressive.
The Hotel does indeed have a beautiful facade, the terra-cotta glazed brick looking so fresh and clean, it begs the question: where did all those bricks come from, where were they cooked, and how did they manufacture them so quickly?
A Massive Clue From San Francisco
For timber will rot, stone, even granite, will disintegrate, iron will oxidize, these and all other materials will succumb to the action of fire, but properly-made and thoroughly-burnt terra-cotta will pass through centuries, and be the last to yield to those influences to which all natural productions must give way--the only material known which is not only absolutely fire-proof, but also, in all architectural employments, practically time-proof and indestructible.
The process of making terra-cotta (a Latin word that literally means "cooked earth") takes about six weeks from start to finish. Aged clay is mixed with "sand or pulverized fired clay" and fired at extremely high temperatures (around 2800 degrees Fahrenheit). After being fired in a kiln the material has to cool for at least a month. If a glaze was applied, as in the case of the Hotel Utah, a clay wash "or aqueous solution of metal salts was brushed or sprayed on the air-dried block before firing."
Each design on the facade of the Hotel had to be hand carved out of clay before being fired in the kiln. This was a painstaking and tedious process, we are told, and had be performed by a highly skilled artist. Just look at the detail on these perfectly homogenous lions:
As the story goes, the contractor who was awarded the terra-cotta work on the Hotel Utah was Gladding McBean, a company located in Lincoln, California that started out making clay sewer pipe in 1875. Supposedly, the brick for the Hotel came from clay deposits close to the plant in Lincoln, and every piece of the facade was fired in Gladding McBean's kilns and shipped to Utah on train cars. This company is still around today, and the video below offers some interesting details on the process of making terra-cotta. Even today in our modern world, the clay still has to be hand-carved by an artist:
The architectural art of terra-cotta has a strange history in the United States, as we are told that it wasn't used as a building material until 1853, when James Renwich, Esq., a New York architect, suddenly became interested in it. For the next fifty years, buildings with terra-cotta finishes went up all over the country, but during the 1920s the industry turned from building facades to clay wares and "restoration" projects. The entire industry of architectural terra-cotta seemed to vanish overnight.
An interesting question to ask here is why was the strongest building material known to man only used for such a short time in the United States?
Gladding McBean's factory was located on the path of the transcontinental railroad in between San Francisco and Salt Lake City. They would've had to ship 3.5 million bricks to Salt Lake during a small window of a few months to supply the masonry company (said to have been James Black Masonry) with enough material to finish the job by June of 1911.
Was this logistically possible? How many bricks could fit on a single train car, how many train cars could a locomotive haul on a single trip? How many men did it take Gladding McBean to sculpt and glaze the intricate clay designs, fire them in the kilns, prepare them for shipping, and load them onto train cars?
The distance between Salt Lake and Lincoln, Californian is 631 miles, the average train speed in 1910 was between 25-40 miles per hour, which means that each train load would take about 25 hours each way. Also consider that each load of bricks would have to be hand loaded onto wagons at the train station in Salt Lake and delivered to the job site using horses.
According to some estimates, each train car could hold about 10,000 bricks, and a single locomotive could haul around 20-40 cars depending on how mountainous the terrain was. This means that it would've taken around 20-25 trips to deliver all the bricks to Utah, or at least a few months just to deliver the product. Although this seems feasible, we don't know the capacity of Gladding McBean's kilns, like how many bricks could be fired at one time, or how many artists they had working to produce perfectly sculpted designs simultaneously. If they could only produce and fire say 20,000 bricks at a time, then they would’ve had to wait six weeks in between each wave of bricks, which would put our time line at more like 3 years just to produce the material (this is assuming that Gladding McBean had no other jobs going at the same time).
Now, we don't know the history of the actual logistics, because we are not given it. The official record says that Gladding McBean was the contractor for the terra-cotta and that is the only information we are given. We don't know what other companies or businessmen were involved in the supply chain to get these bricks to Salt Lake in a timely fashion. We are just expected to believe that it happened in our given timeline.
Now, we can guess at logistics all day long and get nowhere, because the clues that tell us this building comes from a previous civilization are to be found elsewhere; I believe they are encoded into the link between Salt Lake and San Francisco. Remember, Salt Lake and San Francisco have a lot in common, because, as we are told, they were the two fastest-growing cities in the West, sharing a direct railroad line that was also built in record time during the 1860s.
(Did you know that there is also a "Hotel Utah" in San Francisco? Read about its history here.)
Since 1949, San Francisco was said to have burned down many times with subsequent rebuilding. But in 1906 the mother of all earthquakes struck the city, we are told, and damaged gas lines ignited a myriad of fires that burned down 90% of the city's buildings. These, we are told, were rebuilt in less than two years. I found an old book describing the heroic efforts to rebuild the city involving over 25,000 men. The book was published in the fall of 1906, just six months after the earthquake shook the city.
I am going to share an excerpt from the book, and I'll let you decide if what is described was feasible. Just think about this logically and logistically. Remember, just to clean up the rubble of 911 at ground zero took a few years, and that was one building, but homeless and destitute workers in San Francisco, using horse-drawn wagons, cleaned up rubble (with picks and crowbars) and rebuilt thousands of stone buildings in just a matter of months. Read the following paragraphs carefully, the narrative reads like a fairy tale:
The vacant lots were cleared and graded, and the foundations of laid buildings in which merchants who had grown old in the city of the past were to make a fresh start in the city to be. Old buildings were raised and stores built underneath [What? How was it possible to raise a building?]...
The removal of debris in the burned districts was at first badly handicapped by the lack of facilities. But one a a time donkey [does this mean literal donkeys?] engines began to puff in the streets; standing walls began to disappear, and tangled steel and iron came to be straightened out. Bunkers were built and spur tacks laid. As early as July [the earthquake struck in April] a hundred cars of debris were moved daily. An army of men from the camps was soon at work among the ruins, clearing bricks (which had a value in rebuilding, if unbroken) and piling them up in neat stacks; loading wagons en route to the bunkers; tearing down with pick and crowbar the stump of walls; breaking up with heavy sledges fallen and useless cast-iron columns...
Wooden buildings of from one to four stories clustered around the frames and shells of the former great office buildings (already under repairs) and here and there appeared the growing skeletons of new steel, stone, and brick structures--the work of the new city. The foundations of new and greater skyscrapers appeared. Many brick buildings reared their splendid walls high above the ruins around. Building operations involving an expenditure of over twenty-five millions, were under way. The streets were crowded with wagons hauling great loads of lumber. Orders for whole trainloads of steel were placed with the manufactories. Carloads of cement were used daily. Six months after the fire, six thousand buildings, which covered half the burned area, had been erected. A new city was rising from the ruins, gradually, with much labor. (A History of the Earthquake and Fire in San Francisco; an Account of the Disaster of April 18, 1906 and its Immediate Results, pp. 184-192, emphasis added)
The Hotel Utah took two years to build, but men living in camps built 6,000 buildings in six months? This is by far the most ridiculous narrative I have ever read. If this doesn't convince you that our history is a complete fraud and fabrication, I'm not sure what else I can say. This story is 100% impossible. This could never happen in the real world. Here are the supposed before and after pictures of the San Francisco earthquake:
1906:
1909:
Now for the connection to Utah.
In the Deseret Evening News article I shared earlier, published in February of 1910, a story was ran on Dick Jones, the owner of the Jones Company that erected the steel frame of the Hotel Utah, supposedly. Jones was from San Francisco, and the article relates that his company had been busy rebuilding structures in San Francisco lost in the earthquake and fire as follows:
Since the great earthquake and fire in San Francisco the Jones Company has cut a big figure in the building circles of the California metropolis. The great St. Francis hotel, the Flood Building, many of the new structures which have replaced the old in the business district, bear the imprints of the hand and brain of "Dick" Jones and the men behind him. His monuments rear their heads all along Market street, the main business artery. Across the bay at Oakland, in Alameda, Berkeley, San Rafael, Sausalito, in Portland, Or., and in Seattle, the Jones company has left its mark. And it is leaving its mark in Salt Lake, its mark stretched indelibly by the globe-trotting ironworkers who swear by "Dick" Jones because he can always be depended upon to answer the call of one of his "floaters" in distress.
This man named "Dick" seemed to have been able to build massive structures simultaneously all over California. Keep in mind the time line here; Jones rebuilt several large buildings in San Francisco between the years 1906 and 1908, and then had time to erect the Hotel Utah, the Kearns building, and several other unnamed buildings in Salt Lake as claimed by the article. How was this possible for one company to pull off in a matter of 4 years? Just one of the massive steel building frames Jones was said to erect could have taken at least two years. But this man and his crew of "globetrotting ironworkers" can knock out a dozen or more buildings in four years?
Given the ridiculous narrative of the rebuilding of San Francisco in 1906, I'm not sure that Dick Jones even existed. Perhaps he is just an anomaly to explain away all the buildings that our civilization still does not have the technology to build.
Furthermore, the narrative of rebuilding San Francisco after the 1906 disaster offers a few more clues in some of the names that appear in the story. For instance, one of the city planners said to be most instrumental in coordinating rebuilding efforts was named Daniel Burnham. This name is most interesting. Daniel, the name of the biblical prophet who witnessed his three friends being thrown into a fiery furnace and miraculously spared. Just think about that, three men thrown into a furnace and not burned. And the last name is even more obvious, Burnham. The word burn hiding in plain sight. In my opinion, a nod to the fire narrative to explain away the strange construction histories of thousands of old world buildings.
In the same narrative, we find that one of the buildings spared from the fire was the James C. Flood Mansion. Here is yet another clue. Flood, as in mud-flood, a building was spared with the name flood. What are the storytellers trying to tell us?
How is it that homeless workers living in camps can clean up rubble with hand tools and rebuild 6,000 buildings in six months but it takes our modern society (with supposedly advanced technology) six years to build the One World Trade Center that replaced the twin towers?
Dear readers, none of this narrative makes sense. I'm not claiming to know what happened, and in fact, the more I research the more I discover I don't know. At this point all I do know is something is seriously wrong with our history. And as always, I encourage you to do your own research and come to your own conclusions.
Advanced Tech and a Name Change
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Woe unto you that build house to house until everything is crowded and yet you live isolated in that place. The Lord of Hosts said directly in my ear: Truly many families will become desolate, and fine mansions abandoned. (Covenant of Christ, 2 Nephi 8:XII, p. 65, emphasis added)
In this second reference, Isaiah seems to be talking about ancient Jerusalem, the Lord is describing to him what will happen to the very people he is called to preach to. They will inevitably reject Isaiah's message because of their hardened and fallen state, and when the prophet asked the Lord how long the Jews will remain this way, this was His reply:
Until their cities have been destroyed and left desolate, and their houses abandoned, and the land deserted, until the Lord has driven everyone far away, and there are many abandoned places throughout the land. (Covenant of Christ, 2 Nephi 9:II, p.67)
The scriptures are describing both a past and future time of cities being abandoned and left desolate. My question is are we looking at a pattern here? Did such a pattern repeat two or three hundred years ago and did the Utah Brighamites stumble onto those building remains? Why else would they describe hundreds of abandoned houses over 200 miles away from Salt Lake City in 1852?
We ought to be curious about our past. We should want to know who came before us, what technology they possessed, what kind of economy they had, how they approached healing and disease, what kind of food they ate, and what kind of religion they practiced. We can't get away from history, we are only here because of thousands of choices made by those who came before us. Whoever they were, we owe them a great debt for our lives.
King Limhi was very curious about the 24 Jaredites plates that 43 of his men discovered when they went in search of the land of Zarahemla. Instead of finding Zarahemla, they "stumbled upon the ruins of various types of buildings that were once inhabited by many people, as numerous as the Israelites".
The king told Ammon:
I want these records to be translated into our language so we can learn more about the people who were destroyed, potentially the same people whose bones were found with these records. It would be valuable to understand what caused their destruction. (Covenant of Christ, Mosiah 5:XII, p. 129-130)
The Book of Mormon teaches us that a healthy curiosity about our past is a good thing, especially when those who came before us were swept off the land by God's wrath. Moroni and Mormon gave us several warnings about nations being swept off this promised for breaking the commandments of God. Moroni specifically used the phrase whatsoever nation when describing the everlasting decree of God on this land. Although we assume he is describing the Jaredites, the Nephites, and us the Gentiles, he never said that there weren't more. He simply stated that any nation that possesses this land would have to abide by the same decrees, whoever they were.
There is a period of 1200 years in between the destruction of the Nephites and the time the European Gentiles began to inhabit this nation. Were the Lamanites really alone here the entire time, or did some other group take control of the land? And was this group the people who built all the amazing buildings I've been blogging about? Were they subsequently destroyed for rejecting the God of this land, Jesus Christ?
We, the Gentiles, have only been here for four hundred years and are already ripening for destruction. Is it not unreasonable to speculate that other groups could have been here and swept off in similar time frames, leaving buildings, bones, and other clues behind them.
The Book of Mormon uses the imagery of dreams to describe how our lives pass away. Studying history is also like stepping into a dream, a dream with no beginning or no end, like watching the end of a play or movie and trying to figure out the plot. Dreams only give us glimpses of reality, few and far between the abstract nonsense that our subconscious minds feed into the nightly player. When I look at construction photos of the past, they look and feel like an abstract dream. When I read about impossible building narratives, I feel that familiar nagging feeling of something trying to tell you to wake up, that something just isn't right.
Like dreams, true history only comes in glimpses. Those who rule and allow power to corrupt will never be willing to tell the truth. That's why we must become our own historians, we must become diggers, searching the realm for clues about the past. God has given us scripture, true records of the past (as long as they haven't been corrupted), and this is where we start. If He reveals something new, then we get a little closer to the truth. In the meantime, we can study perhaps the only physical link between us and a lost civilization: unexplainable buildings.
Join me next time when explore the narrative of the original Church Administration Building and its Corinthian columns made of granite, standing just east of the Hotel Utah on Temple Square.
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