Gary and Colleen

Mormons' past echoes in Nauvoo
By Jay Jones
Special to the Chicago Tribune

December 27, 2009NAUVOO, Ill. — As the covered wagon moves slowly along an otherwise-deserted street, a crisp autumn breeze blows in off the Mississippi River. What leaves still on the tree limbs rustle while the wagon's passengers huddle beneath the quilts and blankets they've been given to keep warm.

The only concession to modernity is a public address system a tour guide uses to share the saga of a community's extraordinary endurance in the face of religious intolerance. It's a tale teeming with hardship, intrigue and even murder."They were homeless, poverty-stricken and needing a place to call home," says the guide, Colleen Saville, of the people who did call this river bottomland "home" for several years.

Many of her guests already know how the story ends. Like those settlers of the 1840s, they are Mormons — members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — on a sort of pilgrimage to Nauvoo, the town to which thousands flocked to practice their faith before being In recent decades, the Saints (as they call themselves) have spent untold millions restoring and reconstructing their ancestors' homes and businesses.

Volunteer missionaries, many of them retired, help re-create life as it was more than 160 years ago, earning Nauvoo the mantle "the Williamsburg of the Midwest."A trip to Nauvoo is a no-brainer for Mormons — 80 percent of visitors are church members — but there's a bounty of living history here, with lessons for everyone about religious freedom and the struggles of pioneer life.

It's all free of charge; it's also free of the proselytizing for which the church is famous."A lot of times, the missionaries express their own faith," says spokesman Dean Hughes. "They're not supposed to say a lot more than that. We don't want to discourage anyone from coming here."Hughes, a retired professor at Brigham Young University, and his wife, Kathy, are in the midst of a nearly two-year mission that has brought them to Nauvoo to handle public affairs.

When they're not in their offices, they can be found wearing 19th century costumes, greeting guests at one of the many historic sites."This really was a boggy, mosquito-infested place," he tells a visitor. "It was land that (other) people were trying to get rid of."

"Nauvoo began to live up to its name, a Hebrew word meaning ‘beautiful place,'" Saville tells her passengers in the covered wagon. Hundreds of brick homes were built to house the quickly growing population of Latter-day Saints. By the mid-1840s, their numbers had swelled to 15,000.