Sunday and Sites

Sunday morning we went to church and then came back to Grandma and Grandpa's for food and fun. We tried to get a picture of the kids with Grandma and Grandpa.

(Avry, Mia, Zoey, Keely, Dylan and Blake)

The gang playing a "friendly" game of croquet.

Grandma, Grandpa, Meesa, Aaron, Blake, Dylan and I went to do the Community of Christ tour. We saw the Nauvoo House.

We saw the final resting places for Joseph, Emma and Hyrum.

We saw the Homestead, which was the home of Joseph and Emma.

We then saw the Mansion House, which was Joseph and Emma's home. They had a lot of visitors so they built a larger home and then added on a hotel wing.

This is the Smith family cemetery with the Mississippi River right behind it. We learned that they built a damn in Keokuk, which was the city that our hotel was in, to help raise the level of the river because it was too low for all the barges to get through since there is limestone on the bottom of the river in that spot. The river now is about 3 times the width as it was in Joseph's time. This problem of barges not being able to get through ended up being a blessing for the saints because they would have to unload their cargo in Nauvoo and the saints would help them take it down the river a little. It brought business for Nauvoo.

Here is the Red Brick Store, which is a store where Newel K. Whitney took very detailed records of what people bought. There was a place in the back where the bishop took care of tithing and then the upstairs is where many meetings took place, including the Relief Society. The store still functions as a store and you can buy several things, including their famous root beer.