Building Zion: The Material World of Mormon Settlement by Thomas Carter (review)

One can only admire a person who, on retiring from a long and productive scholarly career, takes the time to provide us with a summative statement of all that he has learned over the past thirty-odd years. Tom Carter, who began his study of the Mormon vernacular landscape as a doctoral student in folklore at Indiana University, spent much of his professional career in Utah, where he taught in the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Utah. Carter, of course, is no stranger to anyone who has been involved with the Vernacular Architecture Forum. Along with his writings on Utah architecture, he has coedited volumes of the Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture book series (the predecessor to this journal) and more recently coauthored Invitation to Vernacular Architecture (the first volume of the VAF’s special series) with Elizabeth Cromley.

His new book Building Zion does not attempt to encompass the whole world of Mormon settlement, focusing instead on the Sanpete Valley of central Utah. Those of us who have been longtime members of the VAF remember the field trip we took to the valley at one of our annual meetings and, when we teach vernacular architecture, perhaps still use the photographs we took on that day. The tour certainly demonstrated the diversity of Mormon architecture in the second half of the nineteenth century. We saw log agricultural structures, an adobe house built with a Scandinavian-inspired floor plan, various stone hall-and-parlor houses, a frame I-house built by a Tennessean, and the improbably—at least for a location that seemed so remote in the eyes of the majority of easterners among us—grand and imposing Manti Temple.

Carter makes it clear from the outset that no generalizable statements can be made about Mormon buildings, since the architecture is full of contradictory evidence. But as this detailed and richly illustrated history demonstrates, even if no simple or grandiose conclusions can be drawn, this does not mean that nothing can be said.

In his capstone work, Carter proves himself a historian at heart. For someone who has argued, as folklorists of a certain persuasion tend to do, for the “primacy of the artifact,” Building Zion is firmly grounded in archival research. In fact, in a confessional moment in the preface, Carter admits that while at one time he thought that the landscape “properly studied would speak for itself,” he subsequently realized that “the more I listened to what was being said the more I recognized I was hearing my own voice” (xiii). While Carter has spent decades studying, drawing, and otherwise documenting Mormon structures in Utah, it is the archival materials, including diaries, journals, and church meeting minutes, that provide much of the nuance of his analysis. Here, we confront individuals, not simply Mormons. For a community that used the beehive as its symbol, as people the saints could be as individualistic, obstinate, quarrelsome, and avaricious as most of us inevitably are.

To the extent that any relatively simple statement could be made about Mormon building in the nineteenth century, it is that Mormon domestic architecture, while initially reflecting necessity and the diversity of the original converts, leaned toward conformity to the American norm, while the temples expressed the otherness of the religion. Despite the authority of the religious hierarchy that governed early Mormon settlement in the American West, the forms of domestic buildings were not prescribed, and rather than discouraging displays of material wealth, the belief system seemed instead to encourage them. Even the practice of polygamy seemed to be accommodated by no single architectural solution, and individuals were largely inclined to make it up as they went along depending on their family situations (and the compatibility of sister wives).

Even the temple building seemed to have its own emergent qualities. Although central to the original...