Day 10

This was our first day in Nauvoo - not many pictures were taken today. Also, the battery latch on our digital camera no longer closes, so we have to hold it while we take pictures. The problem with that is it creates a new directory to put pictures in. Now we have pictures with the same names as older pictures in the older directories and it places some of those in different folders - So it's going to take some time to sort out new pictures. These were all I could find tonight. I'll try to upload more as I find them.

Also, please check "Day 8 & 9." Same problem here. I found more pictures that were not uploaded.

I'm glad we planned so much time here in Nauvoo, we're going to need it. There are buildings EVERYWHERE - and each of them have missionaries ready to tell history and stories. We were only able to get to a very few of the buildings. I'll be surprised if we can see it all in the four days we'll be here.

We visited a shoemaker's house, a tinsmith, a blacksmith, a gunsmith (Browning), took a wagon ride, the post office, John Taylor's house, and visited Joseph Smith's house (which was closed at the time). The Joseph Smith house is owned by the Reorganized or "The Community of Christ" as they prefer to be called. I never knew much about this group until this trip. They possess a lot of Joseph Smith as well as early church paraphernalia. The Community of Christ has a rather bizarre interpretation of Mormonism that reminded me more of Jimmy Swaggart. ALL of Joseph Smith's descendants belonged to this church and most of his line (father to son) were "prophets, seers, and revelators." It's strange to me that his own son (Joseph Smith III) could go on in this way. What's more strange (and something else I never knew), David Whitmer, one of the Three Witnesses, broke away over what he called "errors in doctrine" in 1838 - and was adamantly against polygamy and "those Utah Mormons" all of his life. He started his own church called "The Church of Christ." Trying to get to the point of all of this... after a while, his church was absorbed into The Community of Christ sometime in the 1930's. So all of his early possessions went to the C.o.C. And now, finally the point: Everywhere the LDS church has interests (outside of Utah) the C.o.C either owns it already and so the LDS church has purchased the property right next to it - or the other way around. It reminds me of two children fighting over the same toy. Both sides claim that they peacefully "share" and work together but the appearance is NOT that - especially in some of the C.o.C signage.

We're learning lots.