This is the naked Mormon history travel log for March 28, 2017.

Today was my Independence slash all of Missouri Day.

And, okay, independence is a highly contested area in Mormon history.

There are multiple different breakoff factions that are all somehow associated with

Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon that reside here.

It's really incredible.

So the first place that I went, when I first got there in the morning,

it was to the temple lot, known as the Hedricites.

And they have appropriated the term Church of Christ for themselves.

Now, there's a very fascinating history behind this. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar

enough with it because I haven't studied the Navu years very well. But essentially, this guy,

Granville Hedrick, was opposed to polygamy and thought that Joseph and the Brighamite Church

essentially went off the rails at some point, and they were able to acquire the temple lot where the temple of Zion was originally dedicated by Joseph Smith and Sydney Rigden in 1831.

And they attempted to rebuild the temple in the, like in 1928 or 29.

But as with many construction projects, the Great Depression hit.

And they couldn't get any more funding for actually building the temple.

But it was cool.

They began excavation of the site in order to build this temple, and they found the original cornerstones that were placed in 1831.

And I was able to get some pictures of those. They have them in a safe case inside their headquarters, the temple lot headquarters.

Really fascinating stuff. So I spent about

45 minutes, maybe an hour talking with a gentleman there by the name of Bruce Haynes. And we

talked just about Mormon history. It was a really fascinating discussion. And I was happy to get that discussion with him because I wasn't sure I would be able to get any deep Mormon history discussions with anybody else today.

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