Mormons in New York City

It is wise to take many controversies that appear in the media with a grain of salt, for too often they are gone in a few days, and are regularly based on rumor and innuendo instead of fact.

I’m sure that rings true to most of us today. It was certainly true in August of 1866, when a group of Mormon immigrants touched off a minor controversy that appeared in the New York Tribune and then in the Brooklyn Eagle a few days later. The ship Cavour docked at Castle Garden in New York City on July 31, 1866 and almost all its passengers continued their journey by steamer towards Montreal on the following day. From their records, it appears they had no idea of how they would be portrayed in the Tribune a few weeks later.

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In his Encyclopedic History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Andrew Jenson gives a list of the mission presidents of the Eastern States Mission, which generally had its headquarters in New York City, as the following:

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Last week I wrote about a November 1869 article from the New York Times that claimed that the LDS Church was about to build a “Temple” in New York City. But the building described was more like a hotel for immigrants with an integrated meetinghouse than a temple as we know it today. But the idea of even a Mormon immigration way station in the city deserves some consideration. Would such a structure have helped? Was it needed?

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Perhaps the most audacious article about Mormons in New York City that I have discovered is an 1869 article in the New York Times that claimed that a Mormon Temple would soon be built in the city and that $500,000 had been set aside for its construction.

Only it wasn’t a temple the way Mormons today think of it.

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This week I pulled source articles from the New York Times database and found an interesting difficulty that the LDS Church’s immigration agents faced in 1890. US Immigration authorities threatened to deny entrance to Mormon immigrants that year, as a series of 6 articles in the New York Times demonstrates.

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