MaryIrene Homer's great-great-great-grandfather, Willard Richards, was a cousin of Brigham Young, the second prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Richards lived in Nauvoo, Illinois, back in the 1840s, when the town was the center of the Mormon community. But after a well-organized mob killed church founder and first prophet Joseph Smith in 1844, Young would lead the exodus to "the Valley of the Great Salt Lake," and Richards would go with him.

This fall, 155 years after her forebear left Nauvoo, Homer returned to the town on the Brigham Young University Semester in Nauvoo program. Her first choice was London, but now that she's in Nauvoo the nineteen-year-old Utah native calls it "a blessing." "I feel like I really needed to come here," she says. "I was pretty pathetic for knowing how little I did [about church history]."

Homer is far from alone in her return to Nauvoo. Since the 1930s, there has been a steady rise in Latter-day Saint interest in the town. Nostalgic and entrepreneurial Mormons have worked to preserve Nauvoo for future generations, molding it into a destination for both tourists and pilgrims--something like a religious version of Colonial Williamsburg.

Nauvoo may yet become the "Latter-day Mecca" prophesized by a hopeful 1939 guidebook. Along with "the Martyrdom of Joseph Smith and the hegira to Utah," Nauvoo as Mecca gave "the Mormons three of the fixtures found in many long-established religions," the guidebook reads. And now comes a fourth milestone along the route to respectability: the rebuilding of the Temple--in this case, Nauvoo's.

In the United States, however, perhaps the truest indicator of mainstream acceptance is the development of a healthy tourist industry. Even if someone won't set foot in a house of worship, they're likely to stop off at the gift shop. The return to Nauvoo, and the Latter-day tourist industry that has propelled it, parallels Mormonism's long road to mainstream acceptance. But if Nauvoo developed along with the Mormon community, it has also felt its challenges--how to maintain the spirit of the pioneer generation and how to strike a balance between mainstream acceptance and the church's unique identity.

Back in the Latter-day

Walking a mile in Nauvoo shoes

'The predicament of respectability'

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