A single-spire Latter-day Saint temple

A welfare farm becomes ground for a temple

You're standing at the Mount Timpanogos Utah Temple, a single-spire temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, looking out over American Fork toward Mount Timpanogos and Utah Lake. The ground beneath you was once a church welfare farm, used to grow food for local families in need. Hinckley announced the temple in October 1992, then named this site six months later. Workers broke ground in October 1993, with about 12,000 people gathered to watch. Architects Allen Erekson and Keith Stepan designed the building with church staff, giving it the traditional single-spire look shared by many Latter-day Saint temples.

Twenty thousand watch an angel reach the spire

In July 1995, 20,000 people watched as crews lifted a golden statue of the angel Moroni onto the spire above you. When it settled into place, the crowd broke into spontaneous song. The following year, 679,217 visitors toured the finished temple during a six-week open house, with children's choirs performing near the entrance. Hinckley dedicated it on October 13, 1996, across 27 separate sessions.

Three church presidents dedicate the building over a week

The dedication itself unfolded in stages that week, each one carried to the crowds who could not fit inside. Hinckley presided with his counselors in the First Presidency, Thomas S. Monson and James E. Faust, and all three men applied mortar to the temple's cornerstone before the sessions began. About 11,615 people took part in the very first dedicatory session, but only around 2,900 of them actually sat inside the temple. The rest watched by broadcast, filled into the American Fork Tabernacle, a dozen stake centers across Utah and Wasatch counties, and the Salt Lake Tabernacle on Temple Square. Over the full week Hinckley spoke in eleven sessions, and 52 general authorities of the church addressed the crowds in all. By the end of the first day alone, about 38,000 people had attended just the three sessions held that Sunday.

A welfare farm is formally platted as one lot

Four years after the dedication, the ground under your feet was formally platted. In 2000, the church's own corporation recorded the subdivision plat for what Utah County calls Mt Timpanogos Temple Plat A. The following year, that plat became Lot 1, a single parcel of 16.928 acres, and the church corporation held title to it outright. It is the paperwork that turned a former welfare farm into a recognized piece of property, years after the building on it was already finished and dedicated.

A temple built to relieve an overloaded neighbour

In 2002, ownership passed on the county's books to the LDS a private buyer and Temple Corp of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and it has stayed there ever since, confirmed again in county records as recently as 2018. The temple itself grew out of necessity. Before it existed, Latter-day Saints across northern Utah County relied on the Provo Utah Temple, which had been operating well past the load it was built for. Mount Timpanogos Utah Temple was raised to take that pressure off, and it still serves members across 70 stakes, among the largest temple districts in the church.

Presidents and a matching Bountiful floor plan

A line of presidents has overseen the temple since Hinckley dedicated it. Robert J. Matthews served as the first temple president from 1996 to 1999, with his wife Shirley N. Matthews as matron. Later came L. Edward Brown from 2008 to 2011, then Noel B. Reynolds from 2011 to 2014. Reynolds and his wife led the temple together during those three years before moving on. As of 2024, Blaine L. Butler serves as president with Lynn M. Butler as matron.

The building borrows its floor plan from the Bountiful Utah Temple, so the two look almost identical except for their spires. Sierra white granite covers the outside, and stained glass windows by designer Gordon Huether use a patented process the artist calls "Inner Light." Bronze doors mark the entrance, and the single spire rises 190 feet above the grounds, the same spire that held 20,000 people's attention the July afternoon the angel Moroni was set in place.

In the wider valley around this spot, the ground itself carries an older and harder history. In March 1849, General Daniel H. Wells led the Deseret militia in an attack near present-day Pleasant Grove that killed several dozen Ute people, an event now called the Battle Creek Massacre. Less than a year later, in February 1850, ninety Mormon militiamen surrounded Timpanogos families camped on the Provo River and laid siege for nine days. They killed many and took more than 40 women and children prisoner at what is remembered as the Battle at Fort Utah. That same winter, a measles epidemic spread from the settlers at Fort Utah into nearby Ute camps, killing more of them and deepening the conflict between the two peoples. In the years that followed, Wells ordered American Fork's settlers to build a twelve-foot defensive wall around their new town, finished by 1855, though never quite to the scale first ordered.

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