Mormons Restoring City of Ancestors : Religion: Nauvoo, Ill., on Mississippi River was center of the church’s world for 7 years during the 1800s.

Craftsmen are putting the finishing touches on a dream that spans generations: a restored Mormon mecca on the Mississippi.

Completion of a log cabin and post office, due this month, will cap the extraordinary rebirth of the city--known in its heyday as Nauvoo the Beautiful--that was the center of the Mormon world for seven years.

The Mormons have spent 28 years and more than $15 million restoring more than two dozen houses and shops, and have added two visitors’ centers and a 700-acre farm complete with 330 head of cattle.

“People come here because it’s a historical setting,” said Elder Loren C. Dunn, president of Nauvoo Restoration Inc. “By telling the story of Nauvoo, we are also telling the story of the church. The people are coming in through the historical door.”

From 1839 until 1846, a swamp below a bend in the river, some 80 miles upstream from Hannibal, Mo., was transformed into a bustling city of 12,000. Mormons fleeing angry mobs in Missouri and converts arriving from Great Britain were among those who settled in Nauvoo.

Second only to Chicago as the most populous Illinois city, Nauvoo was where church founder Joseph Smith’s vision of a theocracy achieved its fullest flowering. Then, just as in Missouri, political, economic and religious differences with non-Mormon neighbors degenerated into armed conflict.

Smith was slain by a mob in nearby Carthage in 1844, and within two years of his death, the “City of Joseph” was a virtual shell. The Mormons, led by Brigham Young, made their westward exodus.

The Mormons never forgot Nauvoo, however. Decades after their sorrowful departure, pilgrims returned to reclaim a sense of their past. One who made the trip after 78 years put his thoughts to verse:

In ’46 I left Nauvoo

Behind an old oxen team.

Now I’m going back in a Henry Ford,

To see how it will seem.

J. Leroy Kimball, a Salt Lake City physician whose patients included several top officials of the Mormon Church, believed that Nauvoo could be revived. Kimball’s powers of persuasion were a match for his healing skills.

“When you’re there in a doctor’s office with your clothes off, you’re kind of forced to listen,” his son, James L. Kimball, recalled. “Dad really pushed the idea that something should be done.”

Several of those captive listeners journeyed to Nauvoo in 1960 to see the home of Heber C. Kimball, a Joseph Smith associate who was Kimball’s great-grandfather. The doctor had bought the house in 1954 and restored it. Kimball and others who had bought property at Nauvoo were prepared to donate them to the church.

Mindful that any large-scale Mormon effort would drive up land values and inflame anti-Mormon sentiments, church leaders in 1962 established the nonprofit corporation to do the restoration.

The church’s 1,250 acres of old Nauvoo include 23 restored houses and shops. The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which split with the Mormons after the Nauvoo period, has restored another 44-acre section that includes Joseph Smith’s residence and grave site.

The pastoral serenity by the big river and down a verdant hill from the modern town of 1,100 people verges on the mythic. One expert on the city’s history calls it “a dreamscape, almost,” a Nauvoo of the imagination. Local residents say it is “the Colonial Williamsburg of the Midwest.”

That’s just the problem, historians grouse.

Although the project was carefully researched by archeologists, architects and historians, it has drawn criticism from scholars who say the manicured grounds and neat brick structures bear little resemblance to the original city.

“People who go to Nauvoo and think they have seen the real Nauvoo are sadly mistaken,” said Robert Bruce Flanders, a Southwest Missouri State historian. “It’s true of Nauvoo, as of Williamsburg. It really doesn’t look anything like Nauvoo did in 1845.”

Still, Flanders gave the church high marks for its restoration of individual buildings such as the Brigham Young home. He said he knew of no other site where “there is so little development overlaying an old settlement.”

Dunn has heard the criticisms, and tries to put them in perspective. “There are not any two historians that will agree what Nauvoo was really like,” he said, “and we’ve tried to restore it, to the best of our ability.”