Carrying a handful of dimes, the 86-year-old president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints walked out on scaffolding surrounding the tallest tower atop the Salt Lake Temple.
Just a few days earlier, on April 6, 1892, Wilford Woodruff had pushed a button that dropped the temple’s capstone in place. Now he was on a different mission, and he wrote about it in his journal.
“I took Emma & two of her children, Nelly & Alice, & went to the temple & was drawn up to the top tower in an elevator, myself & family. We all put a dime apiece into the topstone. We went through every room in the house. We saw a great deal of work yet to be done in order to get the work done by next April conference,” he wrote.
The Woodruffs weren’t alone. It became a brief tradition for those who could get access to the scaffolding to go see the spectacular view of the Salt Lake Valley and to place a dime into the horizontal seam between the capstone and its base, according to Mark Henshaw, author of “Forty Years: The Saga of Building the Salt Lake Temple.”
It’s a fun story to revisit now that President Russell M. Nelson has announced that for six months in 2027, the church will throw open the doors of “the Temple of temples” — that’s what President Woodruff and his councilors called it in a March 1893 letter, according to James E. Talmage in “The House of the Lord.”
It will be the first and only public open house for the temple since its original, two-hour open house on April 5, 1893. That’s right, two hours, according to historian Richard Cowan.
The public open house will be held at the end of a seven-year renovation project.
The repairs and refreshing of the temple included the removal of the capstone. Preservationists opened it, and showed approximately 400 coins found in and around the capstone to President Nelson and his counselors in the First Presidency in July 2020.
In 2021, President Nelson also walked out on scaffolding above the temple to review the renovation work. The capstone wasn’t back in place then, but it is now, again acting as the footstool for the Angel Moroni statue.
Fifteen of the coins found in the capstone were inscribed with names. People filed off one side of the coin to make room, to the delight of historians.
“Now we have names we can attach to stories,” said Emiline Twitchell, a conservator at the Church History Library. “It’s a cool feeling to come across a coin with someone’s name on it, especially when you’ve been looking at a bunch of deteriorated books.”
One coin bore the name of 10-year-old Florence “Flossy” Hull, who lived in the Avenues in Salt Lake City. Others included 17-year-old Alice Hillam, her sister Emily Hillam and her brother R. Hillam Jr., who lived near 400 South.
“We’re not sure if those families all climbed the scaffolding together or someone went up and threw all the coins in,” said Emily Utt, historic sites curator with the Church History Department.
