Craftsmen are putting the finishing touches on a dream, spanning generations, of a restored Mormon mecca on the Mississippi. Completion of a log cabin and post office by Oct. 1 will cap the extraordinary rebirth of a city known in its heyday as ``Nauvoo the Beautiful'' _ the center of the Mormon world for seven years in the mid-19th century. The Mormons have spent more than $15 million over 28 years to restore more than two dozen homes and shops, and to build two visitor centers and a 700-acre farm dotted 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 to 1846, the swampland below a bend in the Mississippi River some 80 miles upstream from Hannibal, Mo., was transformed into a bustling city of 12,000. Mormons fleeing mob violence in Missouri and converts arriving from Great Britain were among the newcomers. A rival of Chicago as the most populous Illinois city, Nauvoo was where church founder Joseph Smith's vision of a theocracy achieved its fullest flowering. But just as before in Missouri, political, economic and religious differences with non-Mormon neighbors degenerated into armed conflict. Less than two years after Smith was slain by a mob in nearby Carthage in 1844, the ``City of Joseph'' stood a virtual shell. The Mormons under Brigham Young made their pioneering exodus to the Great Basin. The Mormons didn't forget Nauvoo. Decades after having left in sorrow, pilgrims returned seeking a sense of their past. One, making 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 Nauvoo could be reborn. 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,'' recalls his son, James L. Kimball. ``Dad really pushed the idea that something should be done.'' Several of his captive listeners journeyed to Nauvoo in 1960 to see the home of Heber C. Kimball, a Smith associate and Kimball's great-grandfather. The doctor had purchased the house in 1954 and restored it. Kimball and others who had bought homes or property 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 non-profit corporation to do the restoration. The church's 1,250 acres of old Nauvoo includes 23 restored homes 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, hard by the big river and down a verdant hill from the modern town of 1,100 inhabitants, verges on the mythic. A scholar of the city's story calls it ``a dreamscape, almost,'' a Nauvoo of the imagination. Locals boast that it is ``the Colonial Williamsburg of the Midwest.'' That's the problem, historians grouse. Although the project was carefully researched by archaeologists, architects and historians, it has drawn criticism from scholars who say its well-manicured grounds and brick structures bear little resemblance to the original. ``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 of the town. ``It's true of Nauvoo as of Williamsburg. It really doesn't look anything like Nauvoo did in 1845.'' Still, Flanders gives the church high marks for its restoration of individual buildings like Brigham Young's home and is unaware of any 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.'' Dunn points out that the brick structures were the ones that survived in the best condition and, once restored, are far less expensive to maintain. Still, sensitive to the preponderance of brick, Nauvoo Restoration is erecting an authentic log cabin. And a detailed model and film in the visitor center seek to correct any false impression about what's outside. ``It's too clean and too beautiful and you are seeing it at its Sunday best,'' concedes Kimball's son, who is senior librarian for the church's historical department. ``But I think the Saints who left Nauvoo carried in their minds the vision of what it could have been, or will be again.''
