Originally called Commerce – a name indicating the town’s aspirations – following the financial panic of 1837 the town of Commerce was greatly diminished. Land was cheap, therefore, in 1839 when Joseph Smith decided it was time to leave Quincy after the many months of shelter the Mormons had received from that generous community. Smith chose Commerce as the new home of the Saints. He renamed Commerce as Nauvoo, which in Hebrew means “beautiful place.” Smith and the Mormon leaders platted the town with blocks within which were homes, each one having a garden and space for necessary domesticated animals. Soon it was one of the fastest growing towns in the U.S. It was briefly the largest city in Illinois. In 1840 Nauvoo was legally registered. (It is an interesting historical fact that Stephen A. Douglas helped arrange the state charter for Nauvoo while he was briefly Illinois Secretary of State, November 30, 1840 – February 15, 1841). By 1844 Nauvoo had more than 12,000 residents, some of whom were converts from England. 

Notwithstanding the prosperity inside Nauvoo, all was not well outside. Once again relations between the Mormons and their non-Mormon neighbors grew strained, to the point of violence. The city charter of Nauvoo was drafted by Smith in such a way as to not separate church and state and not make Nauvoo subject to Illinois civil law. Basically, a non-Mormon could not arrest a Mormon for an offense. And the charter enabled Nauvoo to have a militia. Smith, as mayor, had control of what elsewhere were separate branches of government and society.

With Nauvoo established, in 1841 Joseph Smith undertook construction of a temple with the physical labor of all able-bodied men in the Mormon community. The Mormon temple was, in its time, the largest structure north of St. Louis and west of Cincinnati. Anyone traveling on the Mississippi River could not have missed seeing the temple, which stood on an elevation in Nauvoo.

In 1844 Charles Lambert, a talented stone cutter from England and convert to Mormonism, designed and carved thirty decorative pilasters for the temple, each with a stone sun face on the capitals to convey a celestial kingdom. Three sun stones survive.

But the Mormons were being attacked by a newspaper outside Nauvoo, the Warsaw Signal.

In Nauvoo itself a group of dissenting Mormons set up a newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, and published a scathing criticism of Smith’s many abuses, inconsistencies and hypocrisies. The Nauvoo police and two hundred other armed men also loyal to Joseph Smith, acting on his orders, smashed and burned the printing press. Smith’s abrogation of freedom of the press (think of Elijah Lovejoy only a few years earlier in Alton, 1837) was the proximal (and final) reason for Illinois Governor Thomas Ford’s demand that Joseph Smith stand trial in Carthage. The other most significant charge against Joseph Smith was treason.

Convinced that that the legal system would again be distorted to support Joseph Smith, a mob from Warsaw amassed outside the Carthage jail on June 27, 1844 and then dozens made their way upstairs to where Joseph Smith, his brother Hyrum and two other Mormon leaders were. In the ensuing gunfight the Smith brothers were killed.

The extrajudicial killing climaxed Mormon fears in Nauvoo of impending destruction of their community. Facing violent hostility from nearby locals because of their growing political power and controversial religious practices, in the winter of 1846 most of Nauvoo’s Mormons fled back across the Mississippi River – from whence they had escaped Missouri – to undertake a dramatic trek across the western United States, ultimately arriving in Utah and founding Salt Lake City. 

After several months in which succession to Joseph Smith’s leadership role was contested, Brigham Young emerged victorious and, still confronting a hostile Illinois neighborhood, decided to lead an exodus of the Mormon inhabitants of Nauvoo to a western territory where the Saints could live as they wished.  There may have been as many as 15,000 to 20,000 residents in Nauvoo at the time. In February 1846 the Mormons began crossing the Mississippi River – for the last time. Their great trek west is today recognized by the National Park Service’s Mormon Pioneer Trail, for they were as much American pioneers as the countless other wagon trains so familiar to us from literature and Hollywood movies.  

Two years later arsonists burned the temple in Nauvoo and a tornado in 1850 completely demolished it.