TODAY IN CHURCH HISTORY: 29 June

[Hemidakota]

1836 - The citizens of Clay County, Missouri, hold a mass meeting in Liberty to accuse the Latter-day Saints of the same charges raised a few years earlier in Jackson County. They pass a resolution asking them to leave the county to avoid bloodshed.

1837 - The missionaries in New York City, traveling to England to open that country to the Gospel, boarded the ship Garrick to begin their journey.

1840 - William W. Phelps wrote a letter to the Prophet Joseph confessing his errors and asking forgiveness. "I am as the prodigal son . . . I know my situation, you know it, and God knows it, and I want to be saved if my friends will have me" (History of the Church, 4:141-143).

1843 - The Prophet Joseph, Sheriff Reynolds, Constable Wilson, and the large group of men traveling with them, continued on their journey leaving Monmouth for Quincy where the Prophet was to appear in court for a writ of habeas corpus. While they stopped for dinner at a house owned by a Mr. Alanson Hagerman, William and Wilson Law arrived with about 60 men from Nauvoo. The two men jumped from their horses and "unitedly hugged and kissed me [Joseph], when many tears of joy were shed." In consultation with his lawyers, Joseph pointed out that Nauvoo was closer than Quincy and so the decision was made to travel to Nauvoo for the writ of habeas corpus. This decision brought much joy to the Prophet Joseph and "gladdened my heart at the prospect of soon being in the midst of my friends once again." They traveled to Honey Creek and the home of Michael Crane where a flock of turkeys and chickens were killed to feed the group on nearly one hundred. (History of the Church, 5:454-456)

1844 - Before a public funeral, over ten thousand Saints view the bodies of Joseph and Hyrum Smith at the Mansion House in Nauvoo, Illinois. The west door opened at 8:00 a.m. and a stream of people entered, viewed the bodies, and exited out the north door of the Mansion House until 5:00 p.m. The family then paid their last respects to the fallen Prophet and Patriarch. Two decoy coffins are filled with sand and are buried during the public ceremony. William W. Phelps preached the funeral sermon. Fear of a bounty on the head of the Prophet led Emma to have the real coffins containing the bodies buried secretly in the basement of the unfinished Nauvoo House across the street from the Mansion House at about midnight. The ground was smoothed as it was before the burial so that no one would know they were buried there. (History of the Church, 6:628). In the fall, the bodies would be moved across the street and buried beneath the "bee house" where they remained until discovered and re-buried in 1928 at their present location in Nauvoo along the Mississippi River.

1960 - Elder Bruce R. McConkie sets apart his son, Joseph Fielding McConkie, a nineteen-year-old, for his mission. This begins the policy of extending mission calls on a regular basis to nineteen-year-old young men.

1985 - The Freiberg Germany Temple is dedicated by President Gordon B. Hinckley. It is the only temple to be built in a country with a communist form of government.

1993 - Mexico formally registers the Church, granting it all the rights of a religious organization, including the right to own property.