This is the Place IX: A Tabernacle and an Assembly Hall

 Previously: Inhabiting the Desolate Cities

Welcome readers. I'm nine posts deep into the topic of the Old World in Utah, yet I feel like I've barely scratched the surface. I've only covered just a few buildings in comparison to the myriad of structures supposedly built during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Salt Lake City. 

For anyone seriously interested in this subject (and is questioning the official narrative), some other buildings to research in Salt Lake are the original Zion's Bank building, the Walker Center, the Continental Bank Building, the original Salt Palace, the original Salt Lake Theatre, the original ZCMI building, the Daft Block, the J.A. Fritz Block, and every building on the Exchange Place Historic District in the downtown area.

You'll find similar "construction" histories with these, and many other structures I haven't even named. The deeper you search, the more anomalies you'll find, and the more questions you'll have.

In this post we are going to cover the Assembly Hall and the Tabernacle on Temple Square. 

The Assembly Hall: A Gothic Gaslighting

The expression "gaslighted" was made popular by the 1940s British film Gaslight, a movie about a man who manipulates his wealthy wife into believing she is mentally ill to make sure she doesn't leave her money to anyone but him; stealing from her while trying to convince her that she is mentally insane.

In a relationship dynamic, gaslighting involves the gaslighter, the manipulating party pushing a false narrative in order to get some kind of personal gain, and the gaslighted, the victim of such a scheme. 

In my opinion, the government, complicit with all major religions, has been gaslighting us about the construction narratives of all the buildings I've been writing about (and thousands more). 

Covering up true history is a phenomenon that I do not believe is limited to our modern society. As the Bible emphatically states: there is nothing new under the sun: this has all been done before.

Ironically, the Assembly Hall on Temple Square, supposedly built between 1877 and 1882, was said to be illuminated with gas lighting. 

Are the storytellers trying to tell us something? 

Here is a photo of this gothic structure:

This building is categorized as Victorian Gothic, which falls within the spectrum of Gothic Revival, a phenomenon of the late 17th and early 18th centuries; but I believe these buildings are actually much older. 

The word gothic is an interesting one. It is usually associated with the Goths, or the "ancient Germanic people", but according to the author of the book The Chartres Cathedral: The Missing or Heretic Guide, the esoteric meaning of the word is as follows:

Gothic comes from goeteia (sorcery, or raise by magical action); its extension is goeteuein (to bewitch).

Indeed, when you look at some edifices built as far back as the 12th century, like the Cologne Cathedral in Germany, it seems as though the structure was constructed with some kind of sorcery (like anti-gravity technology). But the author of the book quoted above asserts that sorcery in this context is not all bad:

The true meaning of sorcery is "to connect with the source." The building was deliberately designed to meld the soul with the building - whose mathematics and geometry represent the cosmos or the body of God - elevating it and enabling an experience of the very source of creation.

In the context of Old World buildings, the term gothic holds both an exoteric and esoteric meaning: to the profane it refers to an architectural style randomly made up in England during the 17th century, to those "in the know", it refers to some kind of construction technology possessed by a past (and highly advanced) civilization, yet falsely attributed to our modern one.

The Assembly Hall was said to be constructed from the "refuse" (left overs) of granite blocks that couldn't be used on the Salt Lake Temple. Here is the official anecdote from a Church News article:

There is a common story that the stone used to build the Assembly Hall came from the refuse of the Salt Lake Temple. Utt said that "While that is technically true, what makes it so interesting is the pieces they're selecting." Cutting blocks out of boulders for the temple left perfectly usable, beautiful building stone. "They took these irregular shaped pieces that weren't of the right size or shape to be used on the temple and built the Assembly Hall out of them," she said. 

Expert stonemasons were called in to bring these irregular pieces of stone together into a building with clean lines and prominent mortal joints. (Article)

Cutting perfectly shaped granite blocks out of "irregular shaped" boulder fragments would have needed to be done with hand wedges during this time period. It was extremely tedious, time consuming, and labor intensive. We are not told who these "expert stonemasons" were, or how they were trained in this craft. 

We do know that holes had to be drilled in the granite before wedges could be driven in for splitting, and during the 1870s, drilling holes into hard granite stone was done with a flat bit mason's chisel. It looked something like this:

This tool was hammer-driven by hand, with each blow rotating the triangular shaped chisel just enough to slowly drill into the stone. As you can imagine, drilling any hole was slow and exhausting. After three or four holes were drilled, wedges and feathers were used to split the stone into a rough block, and then it was somehow shaped by hand with a chisel into a perfectly squared cube, precise enough to require little grouting after placement.

To give you an idea of the work involved in 19th century masonry, here is a video showing how wedges were used:

Of course this guy is cheating because he is using a modern powered masonry drill, but you get the gist of it.

The Assembly Hall, we are told, was needed to replace the  
"Old Tabernacle" built out of adobe (mud) bricks in 1852. Apparently it wasn't large enough to accommodate the needs of the saints, and after Brigham Young announced the construction of the new building, the old one was razed within a month. Here is an artist's rendition of it:

In a past post I wrote about the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City, and as I was researching it I discovered a major error the storytellers made in reference to the "Old Tabernacle". They referred to it as the "Old Assembly Hall" when describing Brigham Young's offering of it to the Catholic Church to use for meetings while the Catholics were building the old St. Mary's church house during the 1860s. 

According to the narrative, construction on the Assembly Hall didn't begin until 1877, yet we find a Catholic priest by the name of Father Kelly referring to the Assembly Hall a decade before it was even built.

(To read the whole story, click here and skip to the section under the heading: Bonus: The Brigham Young Connection.)

Next we have the familiar part of the story we always hear about the architect dying within a year of the building's completion. The architect, Obed Taylor, apparently died in the middle of three building projects: the Assembly Hall, the Walker Opera House, and the University of Deseret. He died in 1881 at the age of 58, just one year before the Assembly Hall was completed, and the building had to be finished by Henry Grow.

There is no literature informing us about Taylor's upbringing, formal education, or training in architecture. We are just told that he was called by Church leadership to assist Truman O. Angell (architect of the Salt Lake Temple) as a "supervising architect. According to a Sunstone article written by Allen Roberts in 1973, this is all we know about Obed Taylor:

Nothing is known of Taylor's architectural background in Canada and San Francisco. He was a quiet, retiring man by nature and left no account of his early accomplishments, but was probably well experienced in the Victorian and cast iron modes which dominated late 19th century architecture in San Francisco. (Utah's Unknown Pioneer Architects: Their Lives and Works, p. 71)

Earlier in the same article, Roberts points out an interesting phenomenon that should rouse our suspicions about 19th century architects in general. Apparently, the majority of them shot from the hip:

There were few professionally trained architects in 19th-century America. A select few aristocrats received school training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but most architects were semi-skilled draftsmen - usually carpenters, masons, or contractors - who also possessed artistic sensitivity and drawing skills. Texts for these self-made designers were limited to a few carpenter's and builder's guides and house pattern books. From these the builder/architect would select his favorite Greek or Gothic Revival cornice details, window and door types, moulding and stair patterns, etc...

Most plans for major buildings were well drawn, considering the primitive drafting implements available, but usually included little more than exterior elevations, floor plans, and a structural transverse section. (Ibid, p. 68)

Are we suppose to believe that nearly all architects in 19th-century America had zero schooling or training, yet designed the most geometrically complex, aesthetically pleasing, and structurally sound buildings (from primitive drawings) that modern architects do not even attempt to duplicate today? The official storytellers want us to believe that 19th century capitol buildings, court houses, chapels, churches, cathedrals, basilicas, asylums, theaters, and temples - masterfully crafted out of hand-carved stone - were designed by amateur architects, making up the plans as they went, and supervising unskilled construction workers? 

Are you beginning to question the official historical narratives yet?

At one time the Assembly Hall was littered with murals all over the ceiling. The man who painted them was W.C. Morris. In an old book published in 1873, his work is described in full detail:

For its artistic design and the many interesting historical reminiscences depicted upon it, the ceiling [of the Assembly Hall] is worthy of special mention. It is divided into sixteen panels, of different shape and design, by an elegant moulding and border. Each panel is occupied by a beautiful fresco ornament, or painting representing historical scenes in the early rise of the Church, and paintings of the different temples built and now building by the Latter-Day Saints.

Representations of the Savior, Moses, Elijah, and Elias are also given. The two largest and principal panels are over the east and west ends of the Hall. That over the west end contains a fresco delineation of the All-Seeing Eye, and the emblematic Hive of Deseret, with the Kirtland and Nauvoo temples in the two lower corners. The panel over the east end contains a historical fresco painting of the angel "Moroni showing the Prophet Joseph where the plates were hid in the Hill Cumorah." The artistic fresco work of the ceiling was done by W.C. Morris, Esq. (The Mormon Metropolis: An Illustrated Guide to Salt Lake City and its Environs, Jos. Hyrum Parry, 1873, p. 18) 

These murals no longer exist today, as water damage from a leaking roof destroyed them. But there are some existing photos. Notice the All-Seeing Eye directly above the organ which is similar to Masonic depictions:

 

The book I quoted from above was written as a tourist guide for sight-seers traveling to Salt Lake City, and part of the very long subtitle includes the following sentence: containing illustrations and depictions of principal places of interest to tourists. Salt Lake City must've been somewhat of a tourist attraction during those years, and this makes a lot of sense if you consider the architectural wonders that existed there. 

This book includes an interesting drawing of the completed Salt Lake Temple a decade before we are told that it was finished, view it here.

The author of the book, Jos. Hyrum Parry, also asserts that the Assembly Hall was finished in 1880, two years earlier than Wikipedia or the Church News article states.

A google search of the name W.C. Morris (the man who painted the murals on the ceiling of the Assembly Hall) in Salt Lake City leads to this Wikipedia page. His full name was William Charles Morris, a writer and cartoonist born in Salt Lake City in 1874. He began his career at the Salt Lake Herald and then moved on to making political cartoons at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington. There is no mention of him painting murals in the Assembly Hall. Of course, he would've been only six years old at the time, which is ridiculous.

Upon further investigation, I discovered that W.C. Morris was given the name of his father, W.C. Morris I, born in England in 1844 and emigrated to Salt Lake City sometime before 1868. He died at the age of 45 in 1889. The only place you can find that this man existed at all is on the Family Search website of the LDS Church. The website offers no actual documentation that Morris painted the murals in the Assembly Hall; the only document the Church provides is an old advertisement for a house painting company. It reads as follows:

V.M. Morris & Son, Painters... Plain House Painting, Signs. Carriages, and House Decorating in General. Graining, Marbling, and Gilding. (See it here)

Family Search includes a photo of the old Assembly Hall murals and a painting of lions from 1888 with Morris' signature on it, but that's all. The only other "proof" I found was an article in the Deseret News, published on April 7th of 1880, naming a Wm. C. Morris as the painter of the murals in the Assembly Hall.

This man could've been very real and the actual painter of the murals in the Assembly Hall, but I just find the whole story very strange. We are told that by 1904 the murals were completely destroyed by a leaking roof and had to be painted over, but the rostrum didn't have to be replaced until the 1960s. If the roof actually leaked, wouldn't the water eventually make its way down to the rostrum and bench seating below?

I wonder if the Church was trying to cover something up (which would have been revealed) by painting over the murals? And why was the All-Seeing Eye exhibited as a central piece painting positioned directly above the pipe organ? What did it mean to the LDS leaders who employed Morris to paint it? I won't get in to the various interpretations of the eye (both good and evil), but I get the feeling, as usual with these historical narratives, that there is much more to this story than we are being told. 

It is possible that Morris painted the murals in an already existing Assembly Hall, or it is also possible that the Church just fabricated this historical character out of thin air, declared that he painted the murals, and then deliberately destroyed them later because they contained symbolic evidence of the Old World.

Interestingly, when we look into other Old World buildings in other parts of the world we find the same patterns and similar stories. For instance, Saint Isaac's Cathedral in Russia, the fourth church on the same site, took forty years to construct between 1818 and 1858. We are told that "the interior was originally decorated with scores of paintings" by Russian artists but quickly deteriorated "due to the cold, damp conditions inside the cathedral." As a consequence, the paintings "were painstakingly reproduced as mosaics." Here is what the interior looks like today:

This phenomenon of painting over old murals is a pattern we find in the narratives of many of these old buildings. Patterns should not be ignored. In the video below, My Lunch Break goes into more detail about this Russian cathedral:

Lastly, the original pipe organ said to be installed in the Assembly Hall also has a strange history. We are told in a Deseret News article written in November of 1878 that:

A few parts that were in the Old Tabernacle are being used in its construction, but as it is being enlarged, with additional pipes, bellows, stops, etc., it can really be called a new organ.

Are we really to believe that a new organ was built out of old one? 

The Old Tabernacle, they tell us, was built between 1849 and 1852, and we are told that the original pipe organ was shipped to Utah from Australia. Remember, there were no railroads coming into Utah at this time, so this pipe organ traveled across the ocean and then made its way from the coast to Utah on horse and wagon.

Yet with no account of how it was actually accomplished, these crafty Utah pioneers built the Assembly Hall's organ out of a smaller one shipped from Australia. Here it is below on the left, compared to the newer model installed after 1961 on the right:

Where did the material for the "additional pipes, bellows, and stops" come from? We are simply not told.

In my opinion, the Assembly Hall was not built out of "refuse" and leftovers from the Salt Lake temple, nor was its organ constructed from the parts of a smaller one. 

I believe the Assembly Hall and its fully intact pipe organ were already here, found by Brigham Young and the first pioneer immigrants upon arriving in a very old Salt Lake City. 

Furthermore, we are told that the first "building" the Mormon pioneers built after they arrived in 1847 was something called the "Bowery", a hut-type structure looking like it was built by primitives on a tropical island. Here is a supposed photo of it next to the old tabernacle:

Are we really supposed to believe that in a matter of a few years they went from building wooden shacks and huts, then to building massive brick buildings, and then a few short decades later they were able to build elaborate granite structures like the Assembly Hall - all with primitive hand tools and horse and buggy technology? 

I'm not buying it.

The "New" Tabernacle

As the story goes, the Salt Lake Tabernacle was constructed between 1864 and 1867, and at the time of its completion it was the largest 19th century assembly hall in the nation. Keep in mind that this was a full ten years before the granite Assembly Hall was built, which begs the question: if the "new" Tabernacle was so large (able to accommodate 10,000 people) than why would they have needed to build the Assembly Hall at all?

The total population of Salt Lake City was only around 12,000 by 1870, with a portion of that being Catholic immigrants, which brings up another important question: why would a building of this complexity, cost, and magnitude be needed for meetings and how was such a small population able to sustain a building project like this?  

Here is an image of the Tabernacle from 1870, next to "extra" precision cut granite blocks supposedly cut for the temple.

Question: with all the intense time and labor of quarrying, transporting, cutting, lifting, moving and shaping each multi-ton granite block, why were there so many leftovers? 

We are told that it was Brigham Young's idea (which he got from staring at an egg over breakfast one day) to construct the elongated tabernacle roof with no interior support pillars which would obstruct the view of audiences, so he commissioned Henry Grow to build a lattice truss arched roof. We don't see any other lattice trussed dome buildings like this anywhere else in the U.S. at that time. This is supposedly a historical first. 

Grow is named as a "civil engineer" yet had no formal training in engineering. He began as a simple carpenter and by some unknown means became a bridge builder. Supposedly, he used the lattice truss system (which he learned from working for the Remington Company in Philadelphia) on the Remington Bridge he built over the Jordan River.

The story we are told about the Tabernacle’s lattice truss arched roof is that it consisted of wooden trusses bound together by wooden pegs and strips of rawhide. According to some accounts, there were no nails used in the construction of the roof because of iron scarcity. The railroads would not have been built until 1869, so importation from the East was limited, and according to an article published by the Church, nails were painstakingly made by forging them "from leftover military equipment or the worn shoes of oxen."

If nails were so hard to come by, then how did they build all these amazing...shacks and sheds?:

The lattice truss arch roof on the tabernacle was 9 feet thick, and designed according to the drawings below:

 

     

 

 

 

The domed roof measures 250 feet long by 150 feet wide, and rests upon 44 sandstone support pillars. According to Leonard Arrington, the Tabernacle required more than a million and a half board feet of lumber, broken down as follows by Henry Grow:

Above the piers there is over one million feet of lumber; in the floor 80,000 feet; in the joists, 100,000 in the sleepers 30,000; in the doors, stands, benches and other parts not enumerated, 290,000 feet. (A Tabernacle in the Desert, Stewart L. Grow, p. 58)

We are told that nearly all the materials for the Tabernacle were manufactured locally due to the lack of railroads coming into Utah. According to the Church article I quoted above, "lumber was harvested from steep local canyons or reused from previous constructed bowers."

If this is true, then what logging company harvested the lumber from these "steep local canyons"? We are simply not told. What sawmills were involved in cutting, shaping, and trimming the lumber to the lengths and widths required for the lattice truss roof (keep in mind that these boards had to be curved; that is hard to do without modern equipment)? And finally, what carpentry shop took the rough-cut timber and tediously built and shaped it into doors, stands, benches, and interior trim, and then sanded, stained, varnished, and installed the finished products? 

We are not given a single name of a logging company, a sawmill, or a carpentry shop that was involved in the construction of the Tabernacle. This is strange considering that the massive Tabernacle is touted as one of the most prestigious construction projects in early Utah, supposedly accomplished by a people who came to Salt Lake Valley a mere twenty years earlier with nothing but handcarts, a few hand tools, and the clothes on their backs.

Stewart Grow, quoting the Salt Lake Telegraph from October of 1867, offers the following names of men who supplied the lumber: Joseph A. Young, President Wells, Feramorz Little, and Samuel A. Wooley (see Grow, A Tabernacle in the Desert, p. 59).

According to Henry Grow, three-fourths of the lumber was supplied by Joseph A. Young, the eldest son of Brigham Young. Joseph A. was heavily involved in the railroads with his father, and before dying mysteriously at the young age of forty in 1875, he was said to have been involved in the sawmill business. Yet, we are not told which sawmills he operated, where they were located, or how they were involved with the construction of the Tabernacle. 

According to Henry Grow's grandson, Stewart L. Grow (who wrote a Master's Thesis on the Tabernacle in 1948; more on that later), the timber for the roof came from Big Cottonwood Canyon, but he makes no mention of Joseph A. Young's sawmill enterprise or where it was located. If Young really supplied over 1 million linear feet of lumber for the Tabernacle wouldn't there be some kind of documentation for this? Wouldn't there be some primary source documents containing the name, location, and the output of the sawmill, as well as a description of the equipment Young used? Wouldn't there be financial documents naming the logging companies Young contracted with? There is no information to be found, anywhere. 

If an organization is going to claim that one man furnished over 1 million feet of lumber in a two year period (in the 1860s) for one of the most famous buildings in Utah, then shouldn't there be some kind of documented historical evidence backing up the claim?    

According to Arrington, the lattice truss roof was finished in only two years, with 150-200 men working on it daily. To keep up with the demand, sawmills would've had to produce and deliver over 2,000 linear feet of milled lumber to the job site every single day (excluding weekends). A typical horse-drawn lumber wagon could haul around that much lumber, but could sawmills keep up with the demand? If sawmills were shut down in the winter and rainy months then the amount of daily lumber delivered to the jobsite would have to increase to 4,000 plus feet to make all the numbers add up. It doesn't.

We are not told whether these sawmills were steam-powered or water-driven, or whether the early Utah pioneers used up-and-down or circular saws. Water-driven circular saws began to revolutionize the lumber industry towards the mid 18th century, but before that most sawmills used up-and-down saws. They looked something like this:

Initially they were operated manually by laborers, but toward the mid 1800s water wheels and steam began to used to drive circular saws. Leonard Arrington seems to concur in Great Basin Kingdom that steam sawmills were fully operational in Utah by the 1870s, but that does not mean they were available and functioning when the Tabernacle was built. 

During the 1850s and 1860s the Latter-Day Saints were extremely isolated and limited in what they could build. All goods coming into Utah were delivered on wagons, and its seems unlikely that a people living in shacks and barely able to feed themselves could divert the massive resources required to build the Tabernacle at the risk of their own survival. 

Even if any of the sawmills could keep up with the demand of spitting out 2,000-4,000 feet of lumber per day, was it even possible for loggers to fell and transport enough timber to do the same? Remember, the 2,000 feet per day (assuming work continued in winter) was just the demand of the Tabernacle roof, but not for the interior woodwork, for other construction projects, or for house building going on simultaneously around the valley. 

During this time period loggers used manual gang and whip saws that required arduous physical labor. Once a big enough tree was felled, it had to be harnessed to a horse and dragged through the standing trees around it, down the canyon on rough, rocky dirt roads (cut into the mountain for that purpose) where each tree would then need to be loaded onto a wagon with some kind of ropes and pulleys. Just the dragging and loading process alone would have required many men, strong horses, and  and untold hours of back-breaking labor for each and every log.  

Once loaded onto a wagon, the teamster would make the trip to the sawmill. If the trees came from Big Cottonwood Canyon this was a 20 mile trip to Salt Lake City, which would've taken 1-2 days depending on conditions.   

Let's say that by some miracle the required 1.5 million feet of roughly-milled lumber was delivered to Salt Lake City within the given time frame. Even if this was the case, the rough planks would've needed to planed and trimmed to their precise size. Judging from the "construction" photo below, the lattice truss roof (and the scaffolding used to build it) would have required several different sizes of manufactured boards and beams:

Coincidentally, I know a little something about cutting and shaping lumber as a consequence of working at my father's cabinet shop for over a decade of my life. At one point during my employment I ran our commercial molder, a massive machine with multiple sets of steel shaping blades rotating simultaneously to spit out perfectly shaped lengths of trim for walls, floors, or crown molding - a 20 ft. length in about 30 seconds.  

Before the wood could be fed through the molder it had to be cut to the correct width on the commercial upcut, or straight line rip saw. New bunks of lumber consisted of rough cut planks planed down to a certain thickness, but there were no straight edges. The upcut saw came with a laser used to trim one straight edge on each board before it could be cut to the desired width. It only took about 5 seconds for that steel beast to rip a 16-foot board, and consequently, I (with one helper to catch boards and scrap) could cut and shape around 2,000 linear feet of molding in a single day. (Ironically, all the molding we produced was part a contract with the LDS Church for new chapels.)

The machines did all the work for me, all I had to do was set up the upcut saw and adjust and sharpen the shaping knifes on the molder. But unlike me, the Utah pioneers who "built" the Tabernacle did not have automated machines with blades powered by electricity to do the work for them. Was it really possible for them to accomplish such a feat in only two years? I don't think so. 

According to the narrative, the roof was finished by 1867, the timeline for the completion of the custom interior seats, benches, stands, trim, paneling, and rostrums is sketchy. The first general conference was held, we are told, in October of 1867, and although we are told that some of the seating was temporary, much of it was claimed to be completed:

As we understand it, the ladies will occupy the two rows of seats in the center fronting the platform. The gentlemen will occupy the side seats and the back seats in the east end of the building. The side seats of the platform will be occupied by the Priesthood - The Bishops, High Priests, Seventies, etc. As the seats do not admit of persons passing those who are seated, the first entering will have their places in the center and so on till the seats are filled. (The Salt Lake Telegraph, October 6, 1867)

If it is true that the interior was also completed by 1867, then that means that sawmills and wood milling shops would've had to spit out close to 3,000 (6,000 assuming work halted during winter) linear feet of precision cut finished lumber per day to keep up with the demand, and around 500,000 feet of this lumber would've been needed for the lavish woodwork in the interior. 

The image below is of the finished interior, and according to this website, this photo of the interior "under construction" was taken in 1865:

Wait a minute... 1865? What is going on here? 

How was it possible for the interior to be "under construction" in 1865 when Edward Martin's famous photograph (shown below) taken a year later in 1866 shows scaffolding where interior benches should be? We are told by the narrators that the roof wasn't finished until 1867, yet somehow these Utahns were able to finish the interior two years earlier?

Are we in the twilight zone? (There is so much confusion as to the completion dates of these old buildings that any serious researcher will find many anomalies among different websites that publish photographs). 

Here is Martin's photo:

Just stop and think about this logically for just a moment: even if the interior wasn't finished until October of 1867, that would've left only a few months to plaster the roof and walls, install the sky lighting (according to Grow 3,500 "lights of glass" were installed to light the building), and to install all of that elaborate woodwork that we see in the photo above.  

It would have been completely impossible to finish construction on the roof and the interior simultaneously. Just the plastering of the roof alone would have probably taken months and would've been a prerequisite to any interior finish work (this was required to waterproof the interior). Yet, according to Grow, quoting T.B.H. Stenhouse, editor of the The Salt Lake Telegraph, the plastering took just over two weeks. This "plaster" was made of some interesting ingredients, namely: lime, sand, lamp-black (a coal tar derivative), tallow (beef fat) and salt. The mixture was 40 gallons of lime-liquid to 5 pounds of salt and tallow. How were all these raw materials gathered, transported, mixed, and applied in only a matter of weeks?

Lime is extracted from limestone through baking it in a kiln in a process called calcination, which involves heating it up just enough to remove impurities without melting the stone. We are told that there still exists to this day an old lime kiln in the mountains to the east of Salt Lake City as shown below:

In the video below, Jon Levi delves deep into the history of this lime kiln and comes to the conclusion that it is much older than we are being told and probably wasn't even a lime kiln at all. 

Also to consider: why would early Utahns build this thing so far from town, having to haul limestone up and down this steep mountain with horses and wagons, making so much more work for themselves?

 This, of course, makes no sense at all. There are so many inconsistencies in all the construction stories.

 

 

According to Grow, the roof also required 60,000 laths (roof sheeting) of wood and 350,000 shingles. We are told that the lumber for these laths and shingles were harvested from Big Cottonwood Canyon, but again we are not told which sawmill manufactured them. How did they produce so much material in such a short amount of time? According to the narrative, the roofing was completed between May and July of 1867. And remember, all these roofing materials had to be hauled to the jobsite on horse-drawn wagons. 

And what of the custom woodwork? What carpentry shop or shops were employed in building the seats, benches, stands, the massive rostrum, the pipe organ case, and the wall and floor trim? There is no mention of this anywhere in the narrative. The only reference to "carpenters" comes from a general conference address by Brigham Young in April of 1867:

You men owing saw mills, bring on the lumber to finish the tabernacle, and you carpenters and joiners come and help to use it up. We are going to plaster the main body of this building here immediately; take down the scaffold at the west end from the body of the building while the east end is being put up. And we are going to lay a platform for the organ, and then make plans for the seats. (Reported by Deseret News, May 15, 1867). 

It is almost as if the storytellers want us to believe that when King Brigham barked a command in general conference, the worker bees literally came out of the woodwork (no pun intended) and gleefully got right to work on obeying his orders. As if there were a slew of gifted craftsman in the congregation just waiting for their skills to come out of dormancy. Honestly, the deeper we dive into these construction stories, the more ridiculous they become. 

Coincidentally, I also have experience in custom wood work. Back at my dad's cabinet shop I worked in the custom shop making raise panel doors out of hardwood. This is a very tedious process, even in our modern day. After boards are ripped and planed down to size, they have to be glued together on a clamp machine. After the glue dries they have to be sanded down to the precise thickness, usually 3/4 of an inch. After they are sanded and cut on a table saw to the exact dimensions, they have to be run through a shaper and then glued again inside a frame called the rail and stile. The finished door looks like this:

After the glue dries the door is sanded tediously and then stained and varnished. This process usually involves several coats of varnish with light sanding in between each coat. At my dad's shop all the tools we used were powered by electricity or pneumatic air. I cannot imagine repeating this process without power tools.  

 Yet, the implements used for shaping and cutting boards in the 1860s were all hand tools: hand saws, hand planers, hand sanders etc. The process for making wood benches is similar to making cabinet doors, except that benches require thicker lumber and many more glue joints. This begs the question: where did Utahns obtain wood glue and did they have steel clamps large enough to secure the benches while they were drying? Were these clamps forged in local blacksmith shops or were they shipped to Utah on horse-drawn wagons? And what of the gallons upon gallons of wood stain and varnish? Were these products manufactured in Utah or shipped from the East (keep in mind that the nearest settlement to Salt Lake City was 800 miles away)? These are yet more logistics we are not given any information about. 

If you scroll back up to the photo above showing the scaffolding you can see a few of the 44 sandstone foundation piers, three feet thick and nine feet deep. According to a book excerpt published in BYU Studies Quarterly, the task of digging footings for the stone piers was performed by unknown laborers:

It is not known how big a crew was used in digging the foundations for the new piers... Digging the forty-four holes in the ground by hand would have taken significant effort because of the relatively dense gravel on which the Tabernacle was built. (Gathering As One: The History of the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, Elwin Clark Robison)

Question: where would the pioneer workers have obtained gravel to lay into the hole before even laying the foundation stones? 

According to the same author, in the 2006 seismic upgrade performed on the building, engineers found that "the tremendous horizonal thrust from the arch had pushed the stone pier and rotated it outward", which "ironically, rather than being detrimental, this deflection of the wood arch trusses and stone piers resulted in a stable structural system."

A footnote reveals that the only thing that kept the sandstone piers from being pushed over by the weight of the dome was their depth. What I want to know is how did Henry Grow (designer of the roof) and William H. Folsom (designer of the sandstone piers) anticipate that the shifting of the dome would rotate the piers and make them stronger over time? 

Indeed, how was this even possible when there are no known drawings of the building in existence?:

For example, how the idea for the shape of the Tabernacle originated and whether plans were ever drawn for the building remain a mystery. Concerning the origin of the shape, one writer observes," No architectural drawings are in existence today, so just what detailed plans were drawn is not known, nor is it known how the unique shape of the building was decided upon." (The Tabernacle: "An Old and Wonderful Friend", Scott C. Esplin)

Robison (author of the book Gathering As One quoted above) also provides some details about the pine planks used to construct the arches:

The planks are about twelve inches deep and vary from two and a half to almost three inches thick. Most early sawmills could not produce dimensional lumber with greater accuracy than that. (Ibid, p. 152)

Again, we are not told which sawmills produced this nondimensional lumber. Or how did this "nondimensional" lumber produced a perfectly symmetrical roof that is still structurally sound to this day.

Robison also has something to say about the "no nail myth," claiming that there were actually "tens of thousands of nails" used in the construction of tabernacle. And not only nails, but thousands of massive bolts as well, which would have needed some kind of threading machinery for screws, nuts, and bolts. Robison claims these bolts were used to secure the joints of the lattice trusses and were anywhere from 6" to 12" long and 3/4" thick. In the photo below, we can see a single bolt head on the left and wooden pegs to the right of it:

According to Robison, there were two nail-making machines in Salt Lake City at the time of the Tabernacle's construction, one of which was in operation in Brigham Young's Blacksmith shop. I have no reason to doubt that nails were being produced in Salt Lake City during this time, as most of the buildings they were building were primitive wooden shacks. What is harder to believe is that a massive amount of resources were diverted from building simple homes to this elaborate Tabernacle, especially when we consider other building projects (like the Salt Lake Temple) that were gobbling up resources simultaneously.

One of these forgotten buildings was the Salt Lake Theatre, which, we are told, was built in just one year, between 1861 to 1862 (supposedly supervised by Joseph A. Young). The only details we are given about its construction is that it was "built entirely of timber, stone, and adobe." As usual, no contractors, logging companies, sawmills, or stone masons were named. Just good o'l Brigham Young, his son Joseph, and his trusty architects William H. Folsom and E.L.T. Harrison. Are we really to believe that a mere fourteen years after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley a destitute and isolated people in a barren wasteland were able to produce this glorious structure in only one year?:

The population of Salt Lake City was only 8,000 at the time of its construction, which begs the question: why would such a small population need this theatre and how in the world did they construct it while trying to establish farms and build simple log cabin homes? Just take a moment to look at the columns and the elaborate detail and ask yourself how this narrative makes any sense at all.

As the story goes, Heber J. Grant sold it in the 1920s and it was demolished shortly thereafter, and this razing took "several more months of demolition" than was originally planned. Our current society has a hard enough time knocking these structures down, let alone building them.

The source of the iron used for the nails and bolts on the Tabernacle is another questionable story. Apparently, there was no iron in Utah. Brigham Young tried to remedy this problem by sending "iron missionaries" to establish a colony in Iron County to mine and smelt ore. But as the story goes, they weren't able to produce enough iron to keep with up with the voluminous demand of the Tabernacle.

According to Robison, the major source of the iron came from military wagons that had been burned during the Mormon War of 1857-58. Apparently, a man leading a group of former Nauvoo Legion rangers, Lot Smith, burned scores of U.S. Army wagons in Wyoming in an attempt to stop their march into Utah. Robison reports that:

The heavy military wagons that accompanied the army had thick iron hoops around the circumference of the wooden wheels and heavy chains and bolts used with brake levers, axles, and wagon trees. (Ibid, p. 155)

Are we really to believe that the U.S. Army was outmaneuvered by Lot Smith and his ragged rangers? The official story on Wikipedia is that Smith and his men stealthily burned three wagon trains full of food, clothing, gunpowder, and whiskey, forcing the soldiers to winter in the ruins of Fort Bridger, Wyoming. So we are expected to believe that a small contingent of men took on 1400 U.S. Army regulars and succeeded in burning all of their supplies, delaying their march for an entire winter? 

And then we are told that a decade later the iron from the abandoned and rusted-out wagons was used to make nails and bolts for the Tabernacle. Honestly, how ridiculous do these narratives have to get before we begin to question our history?

Lacking in Primary Sources

What I have found in this research is reminiscent of the polygamy narrative espoused by the LDS Church: primary sources are either not contemporary or nonexistent, appearing decades later and written by women who were most likely under duress, or, as in the case of William Clayton, the testimony of one man (of questionable character) becomes the hinge upon which the entire narrative is held up. The building narratives are similar, written in almost mythological form, enshrouding 19th century workmen in an almost supernatural aura, accomplishing the construction of epic structures in impossible time frames and with primitive tools and limited means. 

With the Tabernacle, primary sources include journal entries and newspaper articles, but I believe that these have been edited, doctored, scrubbed, and varnished by the LDS Church, the organization that is emphatically in charge of these narratives. They are, after all, the ultimate owners of the buildings, and they have the journals of men like Brigham Young, Joseph A. Young, Henry Grow, William H, Folsom and Truman Angell in their repository, as well as countless other journals that past Church leaders have required to be turned in by the common members. I don't believe we can trust anything that is officially published by the organization, especially when it comes to history.

But sometimes the truth is accidentally (or perhaps deliberately) slipped into commentary that is written about these narratives. One example of such an admission is found in a book (that I've quoted earlier in this post) Edited by Scott C. Esplin and published in 2007 entitled, The Tabernacle: "An Old and Wonderful Friend".

Esplin's book is a really a review of Stewart L. Grow's early Master's Thesis written on the Tabernacle, published by BYU in 1948 and entitled, A Historical Study of the Construction of the Salt Lake Tabernacle. Although Grow's thesis is out of print, Esplin includes snippets of Grow's original work, with commentaries and other insertions, the most interesting (relative to the topic of the Old World) is as follows:

Grow describes how he hoped to "interview all of the persons who would chance to know anything authoritative about the construction of the Tabernacle." Though Grow acknowledged that information drawn from the memories of participants "is not completely authentic and cannot be proved," he argued that the lack of better sources justified its inclusion...

In addition, Grow had access to officials in the highest levels of Church leadership...

In fact, one of the challenges he faced was finding primary sources. Describing the process as "a great deal of 'leafing through' old papers and documents," Grow lamented that little was indexed from the documents and newspapers of the time. (Emphasis added)

Here is a man who was a literal grandson of Henry Grow, the touted builder of the great Tabernacle, who is given access to the highest officials in the Church, and laments that he has hard time finding primary sources to prove the his thesis? Did he even have access to his grandfather's journal? 

Do you see the problem here? 

The Salt Lake Tabernacle, a building that is celebrated by the Latter-Day Saints as being the largest assembly hall in the world at the time it was "built", containing the largest pipe organ in the world, and becoming one of the most famous buildings in Utah, is lacking in primary sources proving it was built by the Latter-Day Saints at all.

Need I say more? Yes, there actually is more. 

Stewart Grow provides two sources for the completion of the interior: The Salt Lake Telegraph and Truman O. Angell's journal. These sources are catalogued in two different books: Grow's original Master's Thesis and his later book published in 1958, entitled, A Tabernacle in the Desert. 

The Salt Lake Telegraph offers a description of exactly what interior portions of the Tabernacle were completed for general conference held on October 6th of 1867. This interior work was said to be accomplished in only a few months (while scaffolding for the unfinished roof was being moved around), a feat that I don't believe would've been humanly possible.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and in the photo below (which I have already shared) Mr. Stenhouse from The Salt Lake Telegraph (the only "primary source" for this account, a source that could've easily been written by AI decades later), describes in great detail that everything was finished by October 6 of 1867 except the benches you see in the raised up area surrounding the main floor. 

Here is Mr. Stenhouse's description:

The stand for the speakers is at the west end of the building and covers 7,500 feet of surface. The front of the stand is a segment of a circle. Before it are a seat and desk for the bishops and others who administer the sacrament. The first seat in the centre of the stand or platform is for the Presidency of the Stake, the next for the Quorum of the Twelve, the third for the First Presidency. Back of these are seats for a choir of 150 singers, with the great organ, yet unfinished, behind them. On the right and left are seats for from 800 to 1,000 persons. 

The speaker's desk is 60 feet in front of the western piers. In front of the stand, for 70 feet, the floor is horizontal, thence to the east end of the floor rises with a grade of one foot in ten. The horizontal portion of the floor is seated with very comfortable permanent benches. The remainder temporarily with the old benches from the Bowery.

During the past six months and for some time before that, Elder Truman O. Angell has been engaged in designing the cornice of the building, the stand, floor, seats, etc. (Grow, A Tabernacle in the Desert, p. 58)

We are told that Mr. Angell began drafting plans for the interior in April of 1867, only six months before it was completed. That is unheard of in modern times. Architectural drawings usually precede construction by at least a year on a project this size, and actual work is slow and tedious. As you read through Mr. Angell's journals as laid out in Grow's thesis, you find that he was giving directions to Henry Grow and the workmen as he was simultaneously drafting plans. This hasty method of construction simply does not happen and if it did it could not produce such a masterpiece as the Salt Lake Tabernacle.

As you read through Angell's journal, he is directing the work (in addition to drawing plans) throughout the entire interior project. This pattern of architects being in charge of construction is seen quite frequently in building narratives of the 1800s. In my opinion, this is done to glorify and almost deify these men who could accomplish so much with so little technology. It is almost a modern form of mythology. 

Also interesting is the fact that Angell's son Franklin became ill and suddenly died only one week before the Tabernacle was finished for conference. This follows another pattern that we see in these narratives of mysterious deaths that take place just before a structure is finished. Truman Angell was the main architect of the Salt Lake Temple, and he died on October 16th of 1887, just six years before the temple was finished (I'll be doing a further exploration of Angell in future posts).  

You'll notice in these narratives that only the important players are mentioned at all. The subcontractors, common workmen, volunteers, and other ordinary folks are completely left out of these stories except as collective labor that seemed to be at the disposal of the elite. In my opinion, this is because population numbers during this time period were much lower than we are being told (or else why were incubator babies and repopulating orphan trains needed until 1925?). 

In my opinion these stories are all a ruse, designed to make you think that almost all men in these time periods were skilled masons and carpenters, able to build anything, even without a set of plans. But the reality is that populations were nascently establishing themselves after a recent reset, which is why the photos you see of 19th century cities and buildings are devoid of people.

I also know a little something about finish carpentry work. The contract between my dad's cabinet shop and the LDS Church included installation of the cabinets, the wood trim, the rostrum, podium, stands, bishop's desk, and sometimes the wood benches. The trim included floor, wall, and ceiling pieces, with the latter requiring the use of scaffolding (or sometimes an indoor lift) to reach the highest places. With a crew of five guys or so, using modern power tools (hammer drills, impact drivers, pneumatic air guns, portable table saws, miter saws, skill saws, jigsaws, etc.), from start to finish the installation of a typical LDS chapel can take anywhere from 2-4 weeks (and even longer for a Stake Center).

In 1867 they had none of the modern tools we take for granted today, but accomplished this massive undertaking in just a few months, and the Tabernacle is much larger than the biggest Stake Center. To cut a piece of trim they had to use a hand saw (for any of you carpenters out there can you imagine mitering a perfect joint with a hand saw?). To build the rostrum and stands they had to use hand planers, sanders, and routers, primitive nails, and home-made wood glue. They had to build the massive stands and rostrums off-site in a wood shop and then deliver them on horse-drawn wagons (we used huge trailers and 1-ton diesel trucks to deliver cabinets at my dad's shop). 

This could not have been accomplished in just a few months. It would have taken years, and that's if they even had the means to do this kind of custom work in an isolated wilderness during the 1860s.

Unlike accounts of buildings in other parts of America, Grow actually includes details about work on the Tabernacle slowing down in the winter months. However, after each snippet about snow, rain, and roads too muddy for wagons, he insists that despite the hardships thrust upon the pioneers by the inclement weather, they were still able to complete the work within the given time frame. Of course he never explains how this was accomplished, but only that it was accomplished. 

During September of 1866 Utah experienced a torrent of rain fail, so much so that wagons roads became impassable. Brigham Young recounts the following:

The rains that we have had, damaged the roads in the kanyons [sic] so very much, that the labor of getting out lumber has been much retarded.

And Samuel Richards reported that:

We are this fall having an unusual amount of rain, the earth is full, and the roads generally almost impassable. No one travels that can avoid it, not even to bring in coal from Weber, which many need to do. The road has never been so bad since the settlement of the Territory. Teams double to come down the summit through the mud, and new the toll road through Parley's Park, they say, has no bottom. (Quoted in Esplin, pp. 157-58)

Despite this weather, Grow declares that "the Tabernacle was progressing favorably during the fall of 1866"...

Really? Wagons can't go anywhere (even to haul coal for heat), but work on the Tabernacle continues apace?

Again, we have the narrators painting a picture of work being performed in impossible conditions by mythological workmen. It reminds me of the following scripture describing the hubris of the latter-day Gentiles:

At that day when the gentiles shall sin against my gospel, and shall reject the fullness of my gospel, and shall be lifted up in the pride of their hearts above all nations and above all the people of the whole earth, and shall be full of all manner of lyings, and of deceits, and of mischiefs, and all manner of hypocrisy, and murders, and priestcrafts, and whoredoms, and of secret abominations... (3 Nephi 7:5, RE)

Is it not prideful to lie about history and make up stories about ancestors being so great as to accomplish the impossible, especially after our own scriptures tell us that God rejected them as a church more than twenty years before? It is not interesting that the Gentiles are prophesied to engage in lyings and deceits, and is this not being done in the telling of their own history? Is it not hypocritical to claim to have built buildings that were clearly built by others who had more advancements in technology?

In closing, I'm going to include a few sentences that Stewart Grow used in his books that lend less credence to the official narrative. After reading the lines that follow, I'll let you decide what to to believe about the construction narrative of the Salt Lake Tabernacle:

The author found no record indicating the amount of work done on the Tabernacle in 1863...

Although work started out energetically in 1863, the records indicate that for some reason little was done except the laying of the foundation and the starting of some of the piers...

There is no original record available which would indicate the exact date the cornerstone was laid... 

There is no evidence that the Tabernacle was worked on during the summer of 1865...

There is no information to indicate what progress was made on the roof during the fall and winter of 1865. It is probable that work was done to prepare the arches...

It appears, therefore, that the plans originally announced by Church architect Folsom were modified. Whether Henry Grow, who is credited with being the architect of the building, formulated the original plans announced by Folsom and then changed them, or whether Folsom or someone else created the first plans, which were changed in favor of Grow's, is not known...

It is a most interesting observation that plans for the building were either non-existent or so incomplete that decisions such as the location of the organ and choir seats were made after the general exterior of the building were well under way...

In spite of the weather and the shortage of materials, progress was made...

The call issued by President Young for workmen to help finish the Tabernacle should have been well received... 

The preparation of the Tabernacle for the 1867 Conference represents a worthy feat of construction and co-operation. Consistent work on this building started September 1, 1865. Within the space of only two years, it was sufficiently finished for Conference to convene on October 6, 1867...

The narrative reads like a fairy tale, as if every obstacle was overcome with ease to make way for this massive building to be erected. And why? So that the Latter-Day Saints could have a place to worship the Lord? Did not Nephi declare that such fine sanctuaries used for worship were offensive to God because they robbed the poor? Did not Alma declare that a synagogue was not necessary to worship the Lord? Yet, the narrators lie about building these buildings and then contradict the Book of Mormon in their reasons for doing so.

None of this makes any sense, but don't take my word for it. Please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. In the next post I'm going to delve into the history of the great Tabernacle pipe organ, the largest pipe organ in the world. As you will soon discover, the organ's story is just as ridiculous as the Tabernacle itself. Stay tuned...

In the meantime, here is one final quote by Stewart Grow that really sums up everything I've been trying to get across in this post, while simultaneously contradicting accounts (about nails and iron) given by other historians:

It had now been twenty years since Brigham Young and his band first settled in Utah. The area was still remote from other major centers of culture or supply. Communications and transportation were slow and difficult. Under these circumstances, the builders of the Tabernacle were obligated to achieve their goal through ingenuity and adaptation. The result was a unique edifice embodying many ingenious techniques. Wooden dowels and rawhide were made to substitute for bolts, nails, and steel straps. The success of these adaptations is attested by the generations of service the building has rendered. Its design has been applauded as one of the world's most perfect specimens of architecture. (Grow, A Tabernacle in the Desert, pp. 61-62)

And here are some interesting historical photos of the Tabernacle provided by the Salt Lake Tribune:

A Look Back: Construction of the Salt Lake Tabernacle

This is the Place VIII: Inhabiting the Desolate Cities

 Previously: Fire, Salt, and Melted Buildings

The Old Testament is full of prophecies about a time when desolate cities will be inhabited by a remnant of God's people who will be spared from destruction.

Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah have plenty to say about cities being laid waste, rendered desolate, and subsequently built back up again - almost as if there is some pattern being revealed to us. In pondering this phenomenon, I can't help but wonder how often cycles of destruction and renewal have transpired on this earth, and more specifically, on this American promised-land. 

The photo above was taken a few years ago by YouTuber Jon Levi. It is footage of the ongoing renovation and excavation of the Salt Lake temple. In the video below, Jon interviewed a construction worker and discovered that the foundation of the building reaches down to a depth of at least thirty feet below the surface. Can you imagine the Mormon pioneers excavating such a massive hole with merely hand shovels and wagons in 1853?

The subject of this post is not the Salt Lake temple, but the prospect of undercovering extensive layers of old building foundations should pique our curiosity of what exactly happened in our recent past.

Is there an entire world covered up and hidden just below our feet?

The deeper I go down this research rabbit hole, the more I realize I don't know anything. How many lost or destroyed civilizations have existed before us? How advanced had those civilizations become? Can we really continue to believe the ambiguous supposition that our modern society is somehow more advanced than any other in history? Does society really follow a curve of upward technological progression as it marches through time? 

The Book of Mormon not only opposes this idea, it poignantly declares that civilizations rise and fall, swelling with pride like waves of the sea reaching their final crest, just before crashing to pieces on the rocks and sands of the beach. After describing the horrific acts of the 4th century Nephites, Mormon relates to his son just how quickly a society can degenerate into barbarism:

O my beloved son, how can a people like this, that are without civilization - and only a few years have passed away, and they were a civil and delightsome people. (Moroni 9:2, RE)

Nations follow the patterns of worlds, as one ends another begins, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing, expanding and contracting, just as the breath that gives us life. As one nation is swept off by God's justifiable wrath, its surviving remnants are left to start anew, to build up the waste places and re-inhabit the desolate cities. Do we really know how many times this pattern has been repeated? Are we arrogant enough to assume that we have progressed through the ages to become the pinnacle of human civilization?

A friend recently pointed out to me a verse in Isaiah that describes a future time when this destructive cycle will repeat yet again, a time when wild animals will make homes in abandoned buildings:

And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation, neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there, neither shall the shepherds make their fold there. But the wild beasts of the desert shall lie there, and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures, and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in there pleasant palaces. And her time is near to come, and her day shall not be prolonged, for I will destroy her speedily; yea, for I will be merciful to my people, but the wicked shall perish. (2 Nephi 10:3, RE, emphasis added)

Isaiah's preternatural description of this future age is a fitting introduction for subject of this post: insane asylums, railroads, and orphans. Below is the Territorial Insane Asylum that once stood in the outskirts of Provo:

Supposedly built in the early 1880s, this facility was used to treat the mentally ill. The original building was eventually razed and replaced with a new structure dubbed the Utah State Hospital.

The 19th century had a dark history of insane asylums in which patients were lobotomized, tortured, and confined in solidary cells. And along with that history we find a connection to railroads and orphanages, almost as if a there was a triple effort underway to repopulate a largely abandoned nation full of desolate cities.

Why were there so many orphanages and insane asylums in operation during the latter half of the 1800s? And why was the U.S. government so involved in the completion of the transcontinental railroads, subsidizing state-picked builders with tax-payer outlays for every mile of track laid?

I wrote about the corruption and inefficiencies of the Union Pacific railroad in this dated blog post, but what about Brigham Young's involvement?

It's no secret that Brigham Young profited from his contract with the Union Pacific, but was there a more pressing reason to complete the railroad to Salt Lake City? Was this yet another assignment that Brigham may have received from his Jesuit superiors to repopulate the largest abandoned city in Utah? 

Before we dive in to the history of the Territorial Insane Asylum, we'll briefly cover railroads in Utah and the orphan train phenomenon.

 

The Wannabe Railroad Magnate

According to Leonard J. Arrington in his book Great Basin Kingdom, evidence suggests that Brigham Young was scouting for railroad routes for the Union Pacific Railroad while the pioneers were crossing the plains between 1847 and 1848. Although Arrington writes about Brigham in a favorable light, he includes some interesting facts about Brigham's involvement in several Mormon railroad companies.

Arrington's book is an economic history of the Latter-Day Saints covering the period between 1830 and 1900. Brigham's involvement in the railroads is reminiscent of later Church leaders' financial manipulations  with the Saltair; using the financial prowess of the LDS church organization for personal gain. 

Arrington's assessment of the LDS railroad shows some clear patterns, revealing that Brigham and/or his son Joseph A. Young were often the directors and/or majority shareholders. Wards were often assigned to help with certain sections of track and bishops actually "called" men in their congregations to labor in Brigham's employ. And Brigham and other Church leaders would often speak of the importance of the railroads in general conferences, using the opportunity to solicit laborers in the name of God and alluding to the promises made in the temple to build up the kingdom of God on earth. 

It appears that Brigham began prepping the saints during the 1850s in anticipation of the Pacific Railroad Act that would finally be passed in July of 1862. Did he have insider knowledge? 

In 1865 Brigham bought 5 shares of stock in the Union Pacific at $1000 each, which made him a director of the company in Utah. It should be stated here that the money used for these investments did NOT come from Brigham Young's personal finances, but rather from the tithing coffers of the Church.

As Church president, Brigham was trustee-in-trust for the corporation (this was before the days of the corporation sole which began under Heber J. Grant in the early 1920s). Trustee-in-trust meant that Brigham (as trustee) could freely act in behalf of the organization (the trust) by diverting its funds as he saw fit. This was a convenient way to use Church resources as a means to buy up stock that would appear on paper under Brigham's personal name.

Between 1865 and 1868, pulpits were pounded and editorials were published preaching the necessity of the saints to support the advancement of the railroads in Utah. On May 1st of 1868, Brigham signed the contract with the Union Pacific, and by fall of that same year, another contract was signed with the Central Pacific. Each venture was purported to bring in around $2 million in revenue. Brigham was not shy about whose railroad he was building:

Work on my railroad is progressing rapidly... (Great Basin Kingdom, p. 263, emphasis added)

The following year the roads were finished, but the U.P. and the C.P. were dragging their feet in payment, which left hundreds of laborers destitute. Eventually, Brigham sent John Sharp to U.P. headquarters in Boston to negotiate a settlement. Only a partial settlement was obtained, with part of the balance being paid in an iron shipment to Salt Lake City. The Church had to sell bonds in the Utah Central Railroad to satisfy the debts to contractors and laborers, but even after all of that, it is estimated that Brigham turned a personal profit of $88,000; over $2 million in 2024 dollars.

According to one writer whom Arrington attempts to refute, Brigham's profits came at the expense of the common church members:

Whether the work paid the men who toiled, or not, Brigham and his friends were certain of their percentage and made large sums of money, while a great many of the small contractors and labouring men were utterly ruined. (Stenhouse, Rocky Mountain Saints, pp. 635-636)

After the debacle with the transcontinental railroads, Brigham turned his attention to local railroads connecting towns throughout the Salt Lake Valley. The first one, the Utah Central Railroad, was organized in March of 1869, with Brigham as president, and his son Joseph A. as superintendent. Brigham was given 200 shares, almost half of the stock of the fledgling company.

This trend continued with the Utah Southern Railroad, incorporated in January of 1871. This time the majority of the shares, 500 out of 801, went to Joseph A. Young. Later, bonds were issued to finance the company, purchased by the sale of stock. Brigham, using Church funds of course, bought up the majority of these stocks and bonds which made him the president of the company. 

By the early 1880s, several Mormon railroads were combined in the Utah Central Railway, which fell back into the clutches of the Union Pacific. But by then, Brigham was dead and his generational wealth legacy had been secured.

By the time of his death in 1877, Brigham Young was worth millions in 1870s dollars, which is hundreds of millions today. Railroads were just a small portion of his portfolio, as he was literally the owner of scores of co-ops in Utah. His position of territorial governor and trustee-in-trust for the Church allowed him to engage in a level of corporate fascism that would've impressed Mussolini. 

The video below covers many of these business ventures:

Why is Brigham's vast personal wealth important in the context of this post?

Because his remarkable business success must be attributed to more than just the fact that he was able to personally tap into the financial coffers of the Church.

Even dictators need connections and good fortune to succeed economically. The Book of Mormon refers to this kind of powerful network as Secret Combinations. 

There is some speculation that Zion's Bank (founded in 1873) was funded by the Rothschilds. If this is true, the entire economic history of the Utah Church needs to be reevaluated and rewritten.

Unfortunately, a financial link to the Rothschilds cannot be proven, not yet anyway. Documentation proving such a connection is in all probability locked away deep within the secure First Presidency vaults of Granite Mountain. But as always, there seems to be puzzle pieces lying around which begin to form a very different picture than the one we've had presented in our noble Pioneer history narratives. 

One piece of the Utah LDS church history puzzle is the building and completion of railroads, which it fits perfectly into the timeline of the mass emigration to to the West and the famous orphan trains that swept across America between 1853 and 1929.

It is estimated that around 250,000 orphans were transported to various parts of the United States during this 75-year period, which begs the question:

Where did 250,000 orphans come from and what happened to their parents?

And as to the Mormon connection we must inquire: what was Utah's role in this mass migration? Was Brigham Young acting on assignment from some superior? And why did he allow so many non-Mormon "gentiles" to settle in Utah? (For instance, according to Bishop Lawrence Scanlan, who ran the diocese of Salt Lake City, there there 10,000 Catholic immigrants in Salt Lake Valley by the late 1800s. By comparison, the entire population of Salt Lake County in 1890 was around 20,000.)

And how many of these orphans came to Utah?

The Orphan Train Movement

According to official history, the mid 1800s gave birth to thousands upon thousands of orphans. In New York City alone, 30,000 children out of a population of 500,000 people were orphaned during the 1850s. This was due, we are told, to poverty, alcoholism, or illnesses like typhoid fever, rendering parents dead or unable to care for their children.

Supposedly, so many children were running around the streets of New York City that they had to form gangs just to survive. Many adult residents referred to them as "street Arabs," "street urchins," or as Disney portrayed in Aladdin, "street rats," and looked upon them as "dangerous" threats to society. (If you pay attention almost all main characters in Disney movies are orphans.)

As the story goes, a well-intentioned Protestant minister by the name of Charles Loring Brace empathized with the orphans and started an organization called the Children's Aid Society in 1853. The organization first offered lodging to orphans and later began placing them with foster families. The idea was to move the orphans onto rural farms to get them off the streets and into family environments.

Brace was only 26 years old when he started the Children's Aid Society, and just a few years earlier he had graduated from Yale University. Interestingly, his roommate and best friend at Yale was Frederick Law Olmsted, a famous landscape architect. As it turns out, Frederick's brother was John Hull Olmsted, who graduated from Yale in 1847 and was inducted into the order of Skull and Bones as a senior. John met with an untimely death and Frederick married John’s widow and raised the children.

This makes me wonder if Frederick was Charles Brace's handler. As I have written about before, Bonesmen are often so intricately weaved throughout historical movements that it seems as if they are quietly influencing things from behind the scenes. Skull and Bones is usually careful not to induct more than one member of an influential family, which means that a brother, although uninitiated, can still be "in the know" and influential in social movements planned out by the Order. The fact that Frederick married his brother's widow is highly suspect to me that they were “keeping things in the family" - as elites often do.

(Interestingly, Frederick Law Olmsted was also the man who chose Jackson Park as the site of the Chicago Exposition of 1893 and was in charge of its landscape design.)

Why would Skull and Bones be behind something as benign as placing orphans into homes? Probably because this whole orphan train project is not what they are telling us it is.

As a result of Brace's orphan placement program, thousands of orphans were soon being shipped on trains to towns all over the Midwest. (Remember the boy in Little House on the Prairie TV series who was adopted from an orphan train?)

When they arrived at train stations, children would be unloaded and displayed on a stage while being poked and prodded by potential adopters. This is where the term “up for adoption” came from. Some children were rescued by decent families, some were used for slave labor, others became indentured servants, others were given to anyone who wanted control of a child and abused in ways we may not imagine. Some were lucky enough to escape and ran away. 

We are told by our official narrators that during the 1860s New York saw an epidemic of infanticide and infant abandonment, and that the Catholic Church came to the rescue by opening up the New York Foundling Hospital. As the story goes, the main building only took a year to build, from 1872 to 1873 (so typical of construction in the 1800s). Here is a photo of the massive complex:

The Foundling Hospital rescued abandoned babies and sent older orphans to foster homes on "mercy trains." In competition with Protestant Charles Brace, they focused on placing children with Catholic families. By the early 20th century orphans had been shipped to every state in the continental U.S.

Doesn't this all sound very strange? Were that many mothers really dropping their babies off at foundling hospitals? Were 18th century populations really that high and living conditions bad enough to merit such an unnatural abandonment of children? 

Where were these orphans really coming from?

By some accounts, they were coming from Russia. By the 1880s, Russia was sending out 10,000 orphans annually into Europe, where hundreds of thousands of orphaned infants and young children were being delivered into places like Spain, Portugal, Italy, Naples, Florence, etc. I believe many of them were being shipped across the ocean to New York, and from there distributed throughout the rest of the United States on orphan trains. 

This begs the question: were all of these orphans Russian? Was it just Russia and Eastern Europe that were having this massive parental abandonment problem? 

These children, in my opinion, were left over from the previous civilization, call it Tartaria or whatever you want. Old maps depict Greater Tartary where modern Russia is, and if there was some great war that ended with the total defeat of the Tartarians, then something would have to be done with the children of the parents who either would not submit willingly to the new order or were intentionally killed to take their children. 

Remember, the victors of war always get to rewrite history, and if you're going to be successful in wiping out a people that are much further advanced than you, then you have to erase them from the historical record. And in saving only the children it is easier to erase the common memory and insert new narratives, which will be "remembered" and anchored into the group history for generations downstream. 

Any survivors of a conquered civilization must be reeducated and forced to go along with the victors, and I believe that was accomplished in the insane asylums - old Tartarian buildings repurposed as mental hospitals.

Before we explore that subject, scroll back up to the map and look at the numbers of orphans in Utah. Notice they are very few. That may have been because Utah probably didn't need orphans to repopulate its abandoned cities. Utah had one better. Utah had polygamy.

Let's think about this question: were Brigham and crew were being trained in spiritual wifery from the very beginning of the Restoration by their Masonic superiors in Boston to prepare for the planned repopulation of the Great Basin?

Did Brigham and Heber join the Church knowing full-well that they would one day orchestrate a coup, and once Joseph and Hyrum were out of the way, lead the laity of the Church out West to fulfill their Masonic orders to claim, settle and anchor an abandoned, empty Salt Lake City which had been discovered and mapped by the Jesuits? 

Of course we don't know, but to me this seems very plausible. 

The Rise of Utah's Territorial Insane Asylum

For some unexplained reason people enjoyed great mental health until the latter half of the 19th century, and then suddenly, everyone went insane. To fix this "problem," asylums started popping up all over the world. 

These massive architectural wonders were built very quickly (in one to four years typically) to house the thousands of mental patients falling prey to this new epidemic. Among the very long list of reasons why people were considered insane, the following "disorders" qualified one for commitment to an insane asylum facility:

• Laziness
• Novel reading
• Opium habit
• Over action of the mind
• Over study of religion
• Over taxing mental powers
• Political excitement
• Religious enthusiasm
• Asthma
• Masturbation
• Death in the family
• Hard study
• Vicious vices
• Superstition
• Greediness
• Grief
• Dissolute habits

(See the full list here).

It seems as if one could've been thrown into an asylum for any reason whatsoever, and once committed, subject to any type of torture imaginable. By the early 1900s, the United States alone housed over 150,000 of these patients in asylums all over the country. Once a person was involuntarily committed to such a place, the chances of ever getting out were slim. If death didn't come from the torture one was subject to, it certainly came later from isolation, depression, or old age. 

The Territorial Insane Asylum built in the Provo area was one of these facilities. As the story goes, it was erected in four years from 1881 to 1885. It was built to accommodate 60 patients deemed "insane" by the Utah Territory, allegedly because the original asylum built in 1870 in Salt Lake City was getting overcrowded. Of course, there are no photos of this original asylum available to view for comparison.

In February of 1880, the Territorial legislature passed an "Act to Establish a Territorial Insane Asylum," with an appropriation of $25,000 to be used for the first phase of construction. A Board of Directors was created with Joseph F. Smith (second counselor in the first presidency at the time) as acting chairman.

As usual, when it comes to the erection of buildings like this, finding any details on actual construction is like finding a needle in a haystack. However, after searching the internet high and low, I found yet another obscure master's thesis, published by the University of Utah in 1948. This one was written by Charles Robert McKell, and is entitled History of the Utah State Hospital, Provo.

Mr. McKell's thesis is an inquiry about the treatment of the mentally ill throughout the history of the Territorial Insane Asylum, but he does briefly cover its construction. Unfortunately, his only source is an article published by The Daily Tribune on July 15th of 1885. As the story goes, only the northern half of the southern wing of the building was built between 1881-1885, here is how the author of the article describes it:

The building as it now stands is but the north half of the south wing of the Asylum as it will be when the whole structure shall finally have been completed, which when done will have a west frontage of 640 feet, with 4 L's 108 feet long, three stories and a basement, besides a small building facing the street. That part of the structure now finished has a west front of 152 feet, and a south front of of 108 feet. The basement story is of heavy rock masonry, and the superstructure of a light colored brick. With its numerous windows in three stories looking out upon the town, and its artistic roof, with cupolas surmounting it, the Asylum has quite an imposing appearance. (See McKell, p. 50)

As to the small building facing the street, it is important to realize that in 1885 that street is pictured as a long dirt road. Consequently, we are expected to believe that construction workers (whoever they were) used nothing but horse-drawn wagons with wooden wagon wheels to haul all construction materials to the job site on a dirt road that would've become a muddy mess with any amount of snow or rainfall. 

In addition to dirt roads, the facility was located miles from the populated city of Salt Lake, separated from town by a large high water table, and in close proximity to a dump. A strange place indeed to build a "hospital." 

Here is a photo of this initial structure (finished in 1885) sitting at the edge of the foothills:

Below is an image of the front of the building as viewed from the long dirt road in 1900 (the entire structure was finished in 1892 according to the narrative). As you can see, the two areas look nothing alike, appearing to be two completely different buildings photographed in two completely different areas:

As you can see in this image, the mountains in the background appear much larger and the ground leading up to the building appears much flatter. In the first image we see barren ground and in the second image established trees, some of them looking much older than the 15 year time lapse presented in the narrative.

Below, in this color photo, we see a landscape that looks more like the first image (color suggesting a newer image), yet with much smaller trees than the 1900 image, and possibly set up on a terrace:

Regardless of the photographic anomalies, the official construction narrative of this building is perhaps the most lacking in detail of all the buildings I've blogged about so far. We are literally given nothing but a time lapse of four years from start to finish of the first wing, and then 8 more years to complete the entire building (completely finished in 1893). 

No construction company is named, nor any general contractor mentioned. There is no mention of how many men it took to construct the building, no mention of who manufactured the millions of bricks it required, or which massively equipped kiln the bricks were fired in, and how they were transported to the jobsite (obviously on horse-drawn wagons), or what group of skilled masons actually laid them. 

We are given no details of the initial excavation and foundation work: whether men with hand shovels dug out the entire foundation of whether a steam shovel was available at that time. No mention whether railroad tracks already existed or were somehow laid through the swamp lands leading to the facility. And we get no information about the purpose for the intricate work and detail that was put into the cupolas (dome-like towers) or what company was hired to construct them.

We are given nothing except the names of the facility superintendent and two architects. The superintendent named was not even a construction superintendent, but rather the first superintendent of the insane asylum. His name was Dr. Walter R. Pike. 

The first architect mentioned in the narrative was John H. Burton. Burton was "self-trained" in architectural design, as his educational training is simply "unknown." And not only was he self-taught, but he

must have learned very quickly at a very young age, because by the time construction began on the asylum he was only 24 years old. 

We are told Burton was shot and killed by Alfred H. Martin in 1887, at the young age of 30. He met this untimely death six years before the asylum was finished, and another architect had to take over. His familiar name is Richard K.A. Kletting, who is credited for designing the Utah State Capitol building, the Saltair, and a host of other buildings in Salt Lake City. Kletting was only 29 years old when he took over the insane asylum project for Burton, as he was also supervising the concurrent construction of the Saltair. (Do you see any problems with this story?)

As you may recall from earlier posts, we often see in these fishy narratives that the original young and inexperienced architect dies prematurely before the structure is finished. We saw that in the narrative of the Cathedral of the Madeleine, and coming up in future posts, we'll cover a few other very famous buildings on temple square where they tell us that architects died before the building project was completed. This, as I have stated before, is one pattern that elites (or AI) use to signify in their code when a building is from the old world. Another pattern is of course the fire narrative.

Finally, we get to the one single mention of a contractor, and of all the contractors one could mention, the narrative chose the plumber. This reference is found in The Daily Tribune article quoted in Mr. McKell's master's thesis. It was claimed by Salt Lake plumbers that the plumbing in the ("brand new") building was "defective" and would have to be redone within a year. But the article asserts that the statement was "founded in malice," and boasts that the man who did the plumbing was a "competent and highly recommended mechanic from the East." 

And that's all we get; just some unnamed "mechanic" from back East.

Supposedly, large water pipes were installed running up the mountain which brought water down from a natural spring, and by the time it reached the facility the pressure was 100 PSI. The building was heated with a "75 horsepower steam boiler" and illuminated by "thirty-two incandescent lights" powered by "a 19 horsepower Brush dynamo electric machine." 

To provide facilities to those 60 "insane" patients it appears Utah legislators spared no expense to ensure their comfort and care. But, as you will soon find out if you watch the videos at the end of this post, the patients were not treated well at all. Nor were any patients incarcerated in asylums (in any state of the Union) treated with any decency during this dark era.

I don't believe there is any way Utah pioneers could have built this castle-like structure in only four years, miles from what was then civilization, in the middle of a swamp, using horse-drawn wagons to transport materials across muddy dirt roads, and then hoisting massive multi-ton blocks of stone up to heights of 132 feet with ropes and pulleys. My sentiments are shared in the words of Wilson from Home Improvement, "I don't think so Tim!"

Now for the next ridiculous part. In 1937 we are told that a massive recreation area was added to give the patients a chance to get out and enjoy some sunshine. So they built (in only one year) a giant castle-amphitheater that looks as ancient as Stonehenge, and during the Great Depression no less. Because, that makes sense.

Here it sits in all its glory:

These pictures do not do this thing justice, because this place is a massive stone complex, with doors leading to multiple passageways, and layer after layer of perfectly laid stone walls. 

We are told that we can thank FDR and his New Deal for this stone colosseum, because it was part of some 200 building projects in Utah taken on by the WPA, or the Works Progress Administration. This government agency supposedly employed millions of workers all over the United States to construct public works projects during the Great Depression. 

One of those projects was the Hoover Dam, built between 1931 and 1936. If you've ever wondered about the official narrative of that massive project, the video below will most certainly give you reasons to question it:

Ironically, we are told that for a decade after the Provo Territorial Insane Asylum's castle-amphitheater was built, it wasn't used much by hospital residents because there were no restrooms built into the design and construction. This is an unbelievable oversight which destroys the credibility of the official narrative. Watch the video below for more about its history and for a visual perspective of how massive it really is:

The Territorial Insane Asylum changed its name to the Utah State Mental Hospital in 1903 and in 1927 dropped the word "mental" and stuck with the much more benign sounding Utah State Hospital.

The old (and amazing) building was eventually razed and a modern (cube-looking monstrosity) was built in its place. Jon Levi, who made the very informative video below, believes it was built right on top of the old foundation. He came to this conclusion after interviewing an employee/historian of the Utah State Hospital and doing a boots-on-the-ground investigation of the premises:

So what do I think this building really was?

I believe it was a Tartarian (or whoever the past civilization was) healing center. The reason it was built far away from town (as many asylums were) may have been because the true architects were looking for converging points of telluric (earth) energy, or ley lines. There is something about these geometric points that create an atmosphere of high resonance, and thus, healing. The building being divided up into small rooms and large wings suggests that it might have been an actual hospital of some sort. 

Here, in the supposed drawing by the architects, we can see the 600-foot-long corridor that spans the wings of the entire structure:

The idea of having such a long corridor may have been to intersect one of these points that is drawing telluric energy. Of course, this is only a theory and cannot be proven. The truth is, we do not know what the past civilization built these asylums for, but I highly doubt they used them to incarcerate the mentally "insane."

Only a barbaric and primitive society would forcibly kidnap, incarcerate, and torture people who do not fit the mental mold of their peers. The long list of reasons for committing a 19th century person to an insane asylum were so ridiculous and general, that it seems much more plausible to me that the so-called "insane asylum" was just a cover word for these facilities being repurposed as POW camps for survivors of the previous civilization reset. 

What better way to erase an entire historical epoch than to literally purge it out of the few surviving minds of those who actually lived it, and to kidnap, reeducate, and redistribute their children. 

The Kearns - St. Annes Orphanage

Pertinent to our subject is the narrative of the orphanage named above. It was first known as St. Ann's orphanage, established in 1891 by Catholic Bishop Lawrence Scanlan, the same priest who headed up the Catholic diocese in Salt Lake City and "built" the Cathedral of the Madeleine. 

The story of St. Ann's Orphanage is a mirror image of the Cathedral of the Madeleine. It began, we are told (along with did the cathedral), as a mere adobe building, gifted by the Catholic Church to the Sisters of the Holy Cross who ran the orphanage. Just as the orphans were beginning to outgrow the abode building, Bishop Scanlan just happened to find and purchase a larger lot for a future orphanage.

After securing a $55,000 donation from Park City mining magnate Thomas Kearns, Scanlan hired Carl M. Neuhausen, the same German architect who helped him build the cathedral, and together they constructed the orphanage in just one year, from 1899 to 1900 - just in time to begin construction on the cathedral.

And to top it all off, Neuhausen promised Scanlan that he would offer his services for free. 

And again, as with the Cathedral, we have no record of any construction workers, no contractor named, no mention of the source of the brick or stone, or any other morsel of detail. Just a priest, his trusty architect, and a few nuns. Together, they built this magnificent structure:

I did find some newspaper articles that provide some curious information about the construction of this building. The first one, published by The Salt Lake Herald on June 20th of 1889, declares that a contractor offered to donate $10,000 worth of foundation work (which included furnishing stone), but the paper is cut off before it reveals the man's name. The other article is not an article at all, but rather an add for a contractor named Peter Marron, who was apparently in need of work. It was published by The Intermountain and Colorado Catholic in September of 1900. 

The add boasts that Peter was the builder of St. Ann's Orphanage and the D.F. Walker Building, and had laid the foundation of the Kearns mansion. My question for Peter is why would he need more work when he was in the middle of building the Kearns mansion? And if Peter was really as skilled as his resume insists, then logic tells us that a contractor of his caliber would not have to post an add in the newspaper to find work.  

Marron's name is not mentioned at all in any of the other official histories of the buildings mentioned in the add. According the narrative, Scanlan and Neuhausen built the orphanage, not Peter Marron.

These are the types of anomalies you find when you begin researching old buildings, often leaving one with far more questions than answers. 

One Final Piece of the Puzzle: Incubator Babies

Did you know that human beings used to be on display at world's fairs and expositions? The first babies were put on display at the 1896 Berlin exposition by Dr. Martin A. Couney, the "incubator doctor." The fee to see the incubators was $1.00.

 

As the story goes, Couney was a German-born pediatrician who specialized in neonatology. He invented incubators as a remedy for the supposed epidemic that rocked the 19th century: infant death from premature birth. Apparently, 36% of all infant deaths were caused by this condition. 

We are told that Couney's own daughter was born premature, and only survived into adulthood because of his invention of the incubator. Babies were put on display up until the 1940s, and were shown at New York City's World's Fair, the Omaha Trans-Mississippi Exposition, the Buffalo Exposition and the Chicago World's Fair, to name a few.

This is a nice story 'n all, but where in the heck did all these babies come from? What kind of parents would allow their infants to be put on display (and charged admission for) at a world's fair? 

According to the March of Dimes, as of 2022 only 1 in 10 babies were born prematurely in the United States - 10% is quite a jump down from 36% a hundred years ago. Was it really this high or was something else going on? 

Was this just another repopulation scheme? Was eugenics at play here? Were these babies the offspring of assigned breeders, to be raised in orphanages and shipped out on orphan trains? Is there more truth than fiction to Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, in which babies are artificially created in a lab, brought to a "hatchery," and then divided into predetermined social classes?

What was really going on in America 125 years ago? 

There are no orphanages today. Parentless children are placed in foster care, and there is no need of government facilities to house overabundances of orphaned children. This seems strange when our population far exceeds the numbers that 18th century Americans were working with. Shouldn't we have more orphans today?

Again, official his-story is not making sense. Let's look at it from an alternative vantage point. 

What makes sense to me is that some kind of reset event happened in the 19th century, leaving cities abandoned and populations decimated. Those who emerged the victors/survivors after the reset needed to repopulate the abandoned cities, and build a usable infrastructure to connect those cities, or find one that already existed. 

Parents from the old civilization that wouldn't go along with the victors were dealt with in insane asylums, their children were kidnapped and gathered into orphanages and sent to labor on farms via orphan trains. Breeders were selected, or artificial means were used to produce parentless babies that could be used for future repopulating, and railroads were constructed to make it all feasible.

Have you ever wondered why it only took six years to build the transcontinental railroad that went from Council Bluffs, Iowa to San Francisco? This seems extremely fast when were talking about all the work to level and compact the ground (done with horse-drawn wagons and shovels), and of course to blast out tunnels through mountains. When it is all said and done, laying the track is the easiest part. My question is this: were the tracks already here and covered in dirt from a mud-flood event and did our people just simply uncover them?:

 

In the timeline allotted, this makes much more sense. Here is the map of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific. Follow the green line:

Notice that the railroad could not have been completed without Utah being a willing participant? And it only took Brigham Young one year to complete? And even more suspicious is the fact that Salt Lake City and San Francisco were "built" up faster than any other cities in the West?

San Francisco is perhaps the biggest smoking gun when it comes to the Old World. It was said to have been built by gold miners during the 1840s and 50s, yet most of the mining camps were 100 plus miles away from the city. That makes no sense at all. In my opinion, the railroad needed to be completed to repopulate, not build up these two cities. 

A great book on this is Jon Levi's Evidence of the Old World, in which he lays out a logical case against why San Francisco could not have been built out in the timeframe allowed in the narrative.

In my next post we'll be heading to Temple Square to take a look at the Assembly Hall, and the "Old" and "New" Tabernacles. 

In the meantime, here are some videos with more detail about insane asylums. 

These two go over the treatment of mental patients in Utah's asylum:

Here is one on orphan trains:

And this one is about incubator babies; apparently "Dr." Couney wasn't a doctor at all:

And here is one about how Cabbage Patch Kids may have been a propaganda campaign to explain incubator babies:

And here is one about insane asylums: