We just got home from Church. My wife, who teaches the 11-year old girls in Primary, reported that one girl, whom I’ll call “Anna,” told the class about a trip to Kirtland her family just returned from. She repeatedly opined how “boring” the temple and other Mormon sites were. In contrast, she had high praise for the Amish tour they took, with its buggy rides, shops to visit and chocolate. I just thought I would share this information for the benefit of any of the powers that be who see this who might want to know how the sites are perceived by an 11-year old girl.
March 29, 2009 at 11:45 am
they should add buggy rides in nauvoo and kirtland! but perhaps she was just bored because the LDS stuff was familiar and the Amish was all new to her? i thought the kirtland temple is intriguing when i was a teenager because when we toured it (granted years ago), the RLDS perspective was so different (“we don’t really know what they did here!”)
March 29, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Sometime ago, I attended a lecture given by someone from the Church Historian office on the maintenance and philosophy of church sites. I can’t remember if it was given at FAIR, CGU or Miller-Eccles. I was very grateful for the RLDS selling food items and drinks in one of the historic buildings in Nauvoo. Without a car we were stranded in the old city and the church offers nothing except a tiny gingerbread cookie at one of the sites. I visited in spring, I can only imagine what it would be like in summer with kids and no refreshments. However, the historian said there would never be commercial ventures in such areas. I can’t retell the reasons but it was understandable and obviously something that had been carefully thought out. That still doesn’t make me want a cold drink any less, though.
March 29, 2009 at 12:10 pm
I like that the Kirtland Temple is uncorrelated. Every time I go there, I get a different tour, which I think is fun. The missionaries who run the LDS tours really study hard about the history, it’s too bad they have to stay on script….although I guess getting off script has its own bag of problems.
March 29, 2009 at 12:13 pm
They do have buggy rides (or at least wagon rides) in Nauvoo. Your 11-year-old friend will find a lot of things that are geared to kids her age and younger in Nauvoo. There’s a family center with interactives, plus all sorts of pioneer life reenactments, from baking to printing to blacksmithing, gunsmithing, and brickmaking.
I know that the Kirtland Temple Visitor Center has a couple interactives — there are some period costumes for kids to dress up in and be photographed, some printing blocks to play with, and places to do rubbings — you can do rubbings of the word “peace” in a number of languages. That’s not a lot, but I don’t think there’s much you can do at the temple itself to make it exciting for kids — it’s a holy place and the experience is necessarily more somber and reverent.
The LDS sites in Kirtland have undergone wonderful expansion with the recent rennovations, re-routing of the road, and construction of several new replica buildings. There’s a lot of potential with the new infrastructure, but I agree that the tour itself (I’ve taken it twice) could be improved by shortening it and talking a lot more about history than they presently do.
March 29, 2009 at 12:29 pm
The Church could propose a full-service restaurant with guaranteed tax revenues in the area, and the locals would find a way to shoot it down.
March 29, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Re: Grew Up (#5) — I don’t know what you’re basing your impression on? The town has been incredibly supportive in all the dealings I’ve had with them. When we held our JWHA conference in Kirtland 2 years ago, the mayor came and opened the conference.
In addition, the town of Kirtland let the LDS Church re-route the main street in the town so that traffic would bypass historic buildings like the Whitney Store. As a result, the old main crossroads of Kirtland is now LDS Church property. If the town was willing to do that for the church, what makes you think it would be opposed to something small like opening a restaurant?
March 29, 2009 at 3:49 pm
It’s fortuitous timing that this post comes up now as our family just went to Kirtland yesterday for the first time. I’ll admit that the tour was a little long but it gave us a lot of insight on the significance of Kirtland. We have a toddler and she was able to stay pretty engaged although the movie was a little upsetting what with the tar and feather scene and all.
I’ll agree that a nice shop and/or restaurant would have been a nice addition.
March 29, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Also, if you are going to Kirtland, make sure to get reliable directions. Even with a GPS, Google maps on my phone, and the printed directions from the church website we were hopelessly lost for 15 or 20 minutes. All three sources told us that we had arrived at our destination which turned out to be a self-storage facility. It turned out that the Historic Kirtland village was actually three or four miles north of where we were.
March 30, 2009 at 12:40 pm
I beleive that the Kirtland Temple is owned and run by the RLDS, so that is why the tours are uncorrelated.