There are two ways to view the large hole opposite city hall in Nauvoo, Ill. One way is Mayor Tom Wilson's; he gives it a glance each morning on his way to work. The other is from a nearby roof, where a camera transmits one photo every minute of the workday to a website run by a Utah company called Deseret Book. That's 540 exposures a day. Few go to waste. Since January the site has had 6 million hits, most by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Nothing is too minor or boring for the electronic audience. "To watch the pattern and progress of the concrete placement," the site recently instructed, "check the archive images from noon on May 19th, and continue throughout the afternoon." Some might call this obsessive. To the physical residents of Nauvoo it is, well, unnerving.
Hamlets all along the Mississippi are searching for a picturesque and salable past. But Nauvoo is the uneasy recipient of a double bounty: a town with two histories and two identities. In the mid-19th century the Mormons built a gleaming capital here, only to be bloodily expelled within seven years. The excavation symbolizes their return. From it will grow an exact, $25 million replica of the first great Mormon temple, torched by arsonists in 1848. Through it the Latter-day Saints will recover a key part of their past and achieve a kind of redemption. The irony is that in doing so, they may erase the identity of the community of 1,200 people that grew up in the interim. "We felt, hey, you're going to take away our quiet little town," says John McCarty, a Nauvoo city council member. "But the church never had a concept of that. They were just going to get their temple."
When Joseph Smith first arrived in Illinois in 1839, his people were in dire straits. Smith, who claimed to have received the Book of Mormon from the angel Moroni 12 years earlier, had attracted thousands of adherents, but they had been pushed out of one frontier town after another and ejected from Missouri under threat of death. Yet within three years the new town of Nauvoo boasted 1,500 log homes and shops and 350 brick buildings. Its militia counted 4,000 men, roughly half the size of the U.S. Army at the time. Its visual and spiritual centerpiece was to be a magnificent white limestone temple, with a 165-ft. steeple visible for miles.
But the Saints' neighbors grew nervous about a heavily armed theocracy in their midst. In 1844 Smith was jailed, then shot dead by a mob and his flock harassed. In 1846, their temple barely completed, they reluctantly embarked on an extraordinary trek. It would produce another mighty settlement, near the Great Salt Lake. But Nauvoo, says Richard Ostling, co-author of the book Mormon America, quickly attained the status of a lost ideal: "the thorough expression of the Mormon kingdom of God on earth."