Provo 1st Ward

Choosing the Site

On 6 August 1852 the Saints met on the public square, measured off ground for a meeting house, and broke ground that evening, after President George A. Smith dedicated the spot. The excavation was finished and the materials gathered. Then they thought better of the place. In 1856 a new site was chosen farther east, and the building went up there instead.

The Old Meetinghouse

What they built became the original Provo tabernacle, though everyone called it the old meetinghouse. It faced north, eighty feet long and forty-seven wide, with a belfry eighty feet high. Our first bishop, Jonathan O. Duke, laid the cornerstone and foundation with Philander Colton and James Smith.

It was paid for largely in donated time and materials, and many of the workmen were paid in food the people had given in place of lumber and nails.

The First Ward met in the basement.

Too Small

When Brigham Young dedicated it in 1867 he declared it too small, and told Provo to build a larger one. They did, and that second tabernacle stands today as the Provo City Center Temple.

Our second bishop, John P. R. Johnson, warned its builders that the center spire would be too heavy for the structure. He was right: the spire had to come down in the 1940s.

What Remains

The old meetinghouse was torn down in 1919. It had stood just north of where the temple is now, and BYU has since uncovered the remains of its foundation, along with some personal items left behind.

Three Wings and a Rotunda

Three wings meet at a hexagonal rotunda, and they were built to stand for three needs: spiritual, cultural and educational. The chapel, the hall, the classrooms.

A Star of David is set into the rotunda ceiling. Three of its points turn the eye toward the three wings, and the other three toward the entrance and two rooms that were once hexagonal themselves.

The chapel was designed by Pope and Burton, the firm behind the Cardston Alberta and Laie Hawaii temples.

The Painted Rotunda

The chapel, the cultural hall and the rotunda were all painted with decorative work when the building was new, and it was painted over in the years since. These photographs are what is left of it: the star at the center of the rotunda ceiling, the scrollwork across the beams, the gallery running right around the room, and a tiled fireplace in the corner.

The Chapel

The same view from the balcony, three times over. First the chapel as it was built, with a painted frieze along the walls and iron chandeliers hung from the vault. Then how it stood from the 1980s until 2024, the organ in place and the painting gone. Then the chapel after the renovation of 2024 and 2025.

An Amusement Hall

What we call the gym was drawn as an Amusement Hall, and it was built for music and drama: a ballroom floor and a stage, with nothing painted on it. The pickleball lines are a much later idea. The city of Provo required the hall, because the new building was replacing a community center.

It had a balcony deeper than the chapel's, closed in years later to make the library.

The Room Above the Rotunda

The hexagonal room on the third floor sits exactly over the rotunda, and it was built for special prayer meetings, with an altar at its center. Until the 1970s, forms of prayer now offered only in temples were performed in local buildings under the direction of the Quorum of the Twelve. The altar was removed around that time.

The narrow spiral stairs that lead up to it.

The Sister Building in Raymond

A second building went up to the same basic plans in Raymond, Alberta. The Church has since sold it and it is a community center now. These photographs show it under construction, and then the rooms it shares with ours: the rotunda and its gallery, the six-sided ceiling, and the chapel.

Things Worth Knowing

• The small built-in table in the Primary room is a sacrament table. The sacrament was served to the children mid-week, when sacrament meeting was held in the evening and few children came.
• The scout room was a dressing room, with showers, for performers on the stage above it.
• Two Relief Society minute books from the ward's early years are still in the building. They have been digitized for the Church History Library, and they record the donations that paid for this chapel.

A Full House

Two photographs from that Sunday. One looks down from the balcony, with President Grant at the pulpit and the chapel full to the walls. The other looks back the other way, at the congregation and the balcony above them.

The painted frieze along the chapel walls, painted over since, is plain in the first of them.

The Dedicatory Program

The order of service, as it was printed.

Opening Hymn “We Thank Thee Oh God for a Prophet”, choir and congregation
Invocation Douglas T. Page
Anthem “The Lord Is My Shepherd”, choir
Address of Welcome and Report Bishop Walter P. Whitehead
Address Patriarch Thomas N. Taylor
Male Quartet “Teach Me To Pray”
Address President Charles E. Rowan Jr.
Hymn “The Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning”, choir and congregation
Address and Dedicatory Prayer President Heber J. Grant
Anthem “Let the Mountains Shout for Joy”, choir
Benediction Alfred C. Johnson

Rheta Kay led the music and Melba Fletcher accompanied. The quartet was Blaine Johnson and Wm. Purdy, Edward Sandgren and Ladd Cropper, with Loa Mathew at the piano.

A Thousand Silver Dollars

At a dinner for his 82nd birthday in 1938, community leaders gave Heber J. Grant, then president of the Church, a copper chest holding 1,000 silver dollars. Rather than keep the coins for himself, he wanted to donate them toward the building of the new Primary Children's Hospital. But he came up with an idea to raise far more than their $1,000 value: he had his daughter Frances set each silver dollar into a beautifully crafted paperweight, and then announced he'd sell them for $100 apiece (roughly $2,400 today). The coins spread far and wide; Gordon B. Hinckley later recalled that his own father bought one.

A few of the paperweights, though, President Grant gave away as gifts. He gave the Provo 1st Ward one of them at our building's dedication, and that keepsake still sits in a display case in the clerk's office if you'd ever like to see it.

Aside from the ones he gifted, his idea raised $86,000 for the hospital (equivalent to about $2.4 million today), 86 times the value of the original coins. The new 70-bed hospital eventually opened in 1952 on 12th Avenue in Salt Lake City.