The Washington Monument’s Mormon inscription

The phrase is inscribed on every LDS temple across the globe: "Holiness to the Lord." It marks the space as sacred Mormon ground, as God’s house. And it’s also found inside the Washington Monument. The 555-foot-tall monument reopened last week after a three-year closure to fix cracked stones from a 2011 earthquake near the nation’s capital, and politicians heralded the original public-private partnership that helped build the obelisk as a tribute to America’s first president. A similar public-private effort went into checking, correcting and rechecking the 20,000 marble stones that make up the iconic American monument so it could open again. Utahns may not realize their own contribution to the towering symbol of democracy. The "Deseret" stone, a two-by-three foot tablet quarried in Manti in 1851 and sent on an arduous journey from the home of the Mormon faith to Washington, was the last — at the time — of the stones donated by various states and territories that made up the union. It sits 220 feet from the base of the monument, joining others from Minnesota, Oregon, Wyoming, Nevada and Nebraska as well as stones donated by the Cherokee Nation and groups representing Chinese and Japanese societies. Brigham Young, the second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and then-governor of the Territory of Utah, chose a committee to search out a block of white limestone — the closest the state could get to good marble — and it was chipped out of the Sanpete quarries, according to the National Park Service. William Ward, a Mormon pioneer and artist, used crude tools over 40 days to inscribe and polish the stone. "Holiness to the Lord," he wrote over a beehive that remains the symbol of Utah’s work ethic. "Deseret," he added underneath. It took three months for Mormon missionaries to bring the tablet to Washington by ox cart, arriving Sept. 27, 1853...more