Happy Birthday Tabernacle! 150 years!
This week during the Music and the Spoken Word Broadcast we are celebrating 150 years of this amazing building. I hope to post the broadcast on this post once it is available.
To commemorate this occasion we all received a beautiful decorative item. I took a picture of it in front of the pipes (shown in the picture above). I'll keep it with all my other choir keepsakes. It's really beautiful.
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| Commemorative item for the 150th Anniversary of the Tabernacle. All choir members received one. Created by O.C. Tanner. |
I have been in the choir now for a few years and I can tell you it is my favorite place to be. I enjoy the Conference Center but if I had to choose a place to stay, it would be the Tabernacle. It's home.
In thinking about this building I began to wonder what was happening in the world 150 years ago. What was the world like when this building was completed and how has it changed since then.Here are some events in 1867:
- Johann Strauss' "Blue Danube" waltz premieres in Vienna
- Nebraska becomes the 37th U.S. state
- Jesse James-gang robs a bank in Savannah, Missouri. 1 person is dead.
- Giuseppe Verdi's opera "Don Carlos" premiers in Paris
- Congress approves Lincoln Memorial
- U.S. buys Alaska from the Russians for $7,200,000
- 1st barbed wire patented by Lucien B Smith of Ohio
- Joseph Monier patents reinforced concrete
- 1st U.S. Dental School is established at Harvard
- African-American given the right to vote in the District of Columbia
- Karl Marx' "Das Kapital" is published
- Alfred Nobel patents dynamite
- Sarah Breedlove, first self-made millionairess in the US is born. She is an African-American.
- The civil war ended two years earlier in 1865.
- In two years (1869) the first Transcontinental Railroad would be completed.
It is now 2017 and the world has changed immensely. Technology, transportation, medicine have advanced greatly since that time and yet this building reminds me that there are some things that endure the changing world we live in. Places like the Tabernacle house the dreams, ideas and ingenuity of country folks. With no advanced technological tools, they built one of the most unique buildings in the world.
This building stands as a monument to the sacrifice of the early pioneers in creating a place of worship in the desert. If walls could talk what would these walls say? They have held countless recordings, concerts and public events. It has housed the General Conference sessions of the church up until 2000. Beginning with Brigham Young, every Latter-day prophet held their funeral services in this space. It is an amazing building and I'm grateful to be able to spend so much time creating my own memories in this amazing building.
Happy Birthday Tabernacle! I'm glad I can celebrate this occasion as a member of the choir.
