A Second Visit [July 26, 2000]

Seven years later, almost to the day, three of my daughters and I visited Winter Quarters once again. On that earlier occasion we were delivering one of our daughters to school in Raleigh, North Carolina. On this trip we were moving that same daughter to Kansas City, Missouri. Since our last visit a new visitors’ center had been built on the west side of the Missouri River and a reconstructed Kanesville Tabernacle built in Council Bluffs on the east side of the river. My journal entry for Wednesday, July 26, 2000, documented our visit:

"This morning we visited the Mormon Trail Center at Winter Quarters, a lovely new visitor center built since our last visit here seven years ago when we were taking Rachael to Peace College in North Carolina. In the center we met a Sister Wakefield, a niece of Garth Wakefield, who works with me in the Missionary Department. We also met an Elder and Sister Ross Williams, whom we knew in Rose Park 24 years ago. After taking the tour of the center and watching a film about the Latter-day Saints’ stay at Winter Quarters in 1846–47, we walked through the peaceful pioneer ceme­tery and saw the new temple under construc­tion next to the cemetery. It is supposed to be completed by the end of the year.

"Back on I–680, we drove across the Mormon Bridge into Iowa, joined I–29 and headed south into Council Bluffs, where we found the reconstructed Kanes­ville Taber­nacle, where Brigham Young was first sus­tained as the second President of the Church, with Heber C. Kimball and Willard Richards as his counselors in the First Presi­dency, at a special confer­ence on December 27, 1847. Elder Williams, whom we had seen over in Winter Quarters, was our tour guide at the Tabernacle. He let Camilla and me play an old organ—over a hundred years old, he said—in the Tabernacle."

Although this was our second visit to the historic Winter Quarters area, it was our first time to see the new visitors' center just east of the old pioneer cemetery, our first time to see the temple then under construction just south of the cemetery, and our first time to see the reconstructed Kanesville Tabernacle on the other side of the river.