During the dedicatory prayer, President Hinckley acknowledged the sacrifices of the martyrs and the original builders, pleading for God's protection of the new structure. He asked Latter-day Saints to recommit themselves to the same type of dedication as their ancestors.

"The hearts of the children have literally turned to those fathers who worked on the original building," he said in the prayer. "They have done so with love and a wonderful spirit of consecrated effort."

Some 331,849 visitors — an average of 7,607 a day — visited the temple during the public tours, which ran from May 1 through June 22. Ordinance work began in the temple July 3.

The announcement that the church would rebuild the long-lost temple — destroyed by fire, storm and vandals in Illinois a century and a half earlier — proved to be one of the most galvanizing of President Hinckley's tenure.

He told the world of the reconstruction plans near the end of the Sunday afternoon session of the 169th Annual General Conference on April 4, 1999 — "almost as an afterthought," President Hinckley noted a few months later.

"I've never seen anything that elicited more excitement than this announcement," he said during groundbreaking ceremonies in October 1999. "It scared me almost."

President Hinckley then mentioned his father's suggestion that the temple be rebuilt in Nauvoo, in western Illinois along the Mississippi River. However, "the church didn't have a lot of money in those days," President Hinckley said in one interview. "That was just coming out of the Depression.... They declined it."

But the idea lingered.

The $23 million reconstruction was largely underwritten by donors, "those who love the Lord and love this work," he said.

The project was, in effect, a re-creation of the original, on the same location and structural footprint, with nearly the same height and exterior appearance. The interior, although having many harkenings to the past, houses a modern, functioning LDS temple.

"The rebuilding of the Nauvoo Temple will bring back a clear and vivid reminder of what Nauvoo was. Nauvoo was a prosperous and great city," President Hinckley said.

The original five-story temple was the church's second (the first was in Kirtland, Ohio) and the first where members could perform baptisms, marriages and other sacred temple ordinances. The temple in 2002 became the 113th. Now there are 124 operating temples.

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From Deseret News and Church News archives