Missouri to host Mormon history conference

SALT LAKE CITY — Hundreds of Mormon history enthusiasts are gathering this week near Independence, Mo., the scene of some of the most dramatic, formative and turbulent events in the faith's 180-year history.

The Mormon History Association, a nondenominational group, is holding its annual conference Thursday through Sunday at the Holiday Inn-CoCo Key Water Resort hotel in Kansas City, which is just seven miles from downtown Independence, where Joseph Smith, prophet and founding president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, endeavored to establish the center of the church in the early 1830s. Tensions with established residents in the area led to mob hostility and expulsion of church members from that city.

The conflict escalated into the bitter "Mormon War" of 1838 and ultimately the church members being driven en masse into neighboring Illinois under threat of an "Extermination Order" issued by Missouri Gov. Lilburn W. Boggs.

Welcoming conference-goers on Thursday evening will be President Steven Veazy of the Community of Christ, formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which has its headquarters and temple in Independence.

"Though a worldwide movement with a multiplicity of ecclesiastical expressions, Mormonism still features Missouri as a central focus," said Ronald E. Romig, site director of the Kirtland Temple Visitors Center in Ohio and current president of the Mormon History Association. "Similarly, the Mormon History Association's conference theme is designed to explore the integrating role of extended family as a focus of renewal within the movement — The Home and Homeland: Families in Diverse Mormon Traditions."

Other speakers at the conference include Harvard scholar and LDS Church member Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who will address Mormon family and kinship as revealed through 19th century diaries, and Claudia L. Bushman of Claremont Graduate University and California, an LDS scholar who will conduct a reader's theater on LDS women in the 20th century.

The Independence area offers a rich concentration of Mormon history, where conference attendees might also visit the LDS visitors center or the Community of Christ temple, which is downtown. Other sites within a day's driving distance, such as Liberty Jail, where Joseph Smith companions were imprisoned for five months; Haun's Mill, where 17 men and boys were killed and 13 people wounded in he massacre of Oct. 30, 1838; and Richmond, where Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer, two of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon, are buried.

Independence also holds some nationally historic significance as the hometown of Harry S. Truman, 33rd president of the United States, and the location of his presidential library and grave site.

e-mail: rscott@desnews.com