A fire that ended in a temple

Fire gutted the tabernacle down to its brick walls

Fire tore through the Provo Tabernacle and destroyed almost everything inside it. The building had stood on this spot since 1883, a brick landmark for concerts, funerals and church conferences. The flames burned out the interior. Only the outer walls survived.

Within a year, church leaders decided not to tear the shell down. In October 2011, church president Thomas S. Monson announced the building would rise again, this time as a temple. Workers spent the next several years rebuilding from the ground up. They stabilized the surviving walls on stilts so crews could dig two new basement levels underneath. Stained glass salvaged from the old tabernacle went back into the new design, alongside a window pulled from a demolished Presbyterian church in New York.

A temple rose dedicated inside the burned shell

On March 20, 2016, Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles dedicated the finished Provo City Center Temple. It stands where the tabernacle burned, its brick shell now wrapped around a new Victorian-styled interior of stained glass, African mahogany and walnut. The temple you see from here was built, quite literally, out of what the fire did not finish burning.

The ground under the county building at your back has its own quieter paper trail. Utah County transferred the parcel to its own Municipal Building Authority in 1986. It then swapped the land back and forth with the state's facilities division through 1991 and 1992. The lot as it exists today was finally platted in 1992. Mountain Fuel Supply Company signed over its own claim to the state that same year. Two easements, filed in 2011 and 2012, are the only entries since. The Utah County Municipal Building Authority and the state's facilities division still hold title to it now.

An earlier meetinghouse was torn down for a tabernacle

Before the tabernacle that burned, there was another one. A meetinghouse stood on this same block from 1861. It was the first serious church building Provo put up after Brigham Young's settlers arrived. It served the town for nearly sixty years. In 1919 the church tore it down. The Provo Downtown Historic District made room for something larger, the tabernacle that would later carry the name people still use for the square. The building that burned in 2010 was already a replacement.

Militia besieged Timpanogos families camped by the river

Eleven years before that first meetinghouse went up, this ground had already seen its worst week. In February 1850, Mormon militia surrounded an encampment of Timpanogos families camped along the Provo River, acting on orders from Brigham Young. The siege ran for days. Militiamen shot as many as a hundred Timpanogos men, and at least one woman, with rifles and cannon fire, then hunted down those who fled. One militiaman died. Eighteen were wounded. Nothing was rebuilt afterward. There was nothing left standing to rebuild.

Senator Reed Smoot's house never burned or moved

Two blocks over, Reed O. Smoot House sat down in 1892 and drew the first sketches of his own house himself, before handing them to an architect to finish. Smoot went on to serve decades as a United States senator, shaping the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and hosting sitting presidents in that same house. He lived in it until he died in 1941. It never burned, never came down, never got rebuilt as something else. It just stayed his, and stayed standing.

County land changed hands four times, nothing built

The dirt under the county building at your back changed hands four times in six years without anyone building anything new on it. Utah County deeded it to its own Municipal Building Authority in 1986. In 1991 the authority handed it back to the county. The county deeded it to the state's facilities division the same week. Mountain Fuel Supply Company signed away its own claim to the state in 1992. Only then was the parcel finally platted, drawn as the lot that exists today. It has sat that way since, held jointly by the county authority and the state.