This is a revisit of a post I did in 2015, that was a revisit of a post I did a few years before that. I’ve checked TripAdvisor reviews and inserted some that are more recent to see if there’s been any improvement. So far, I can’t tell that there has been. If any of you have personal experience with a Beehive House tour, please comment below.
An interesting article in the Salt Lake Tribune reminded me of a post I did many years ago about a non-member review of Kirtland. Kirtland is an interesting historical site because some of the attractions are run by the LDS church, and some are run by the Community of Christ. In my experience, both tour guides were very knowledgeable, but the key difference was that the LDS tour guides persisted in inserting “spiritual” experiences into the tour such as invitations for spontaneous hymn singing, testimony bearing or (whew!) moments of silence. Yet, the senior couple who took us through the site was very knowledgeable about the history of the site. They had clearly done their homework.
By contrast, the article in the Tribune was about a recent visitor to the Beehive House (Brigham Young’s SLC home) who had questions about her family’s connection to Brigham Young.
While visiting the Beehive House, however, Gifford was disappointed to learn from two tour guides that they knew nothing of her ancestors’ history. In fact, they assured her that Brigham Young had only two wives and had wed his second spouse only after the death of his first wife.
When Gifford asked for some literature on the subject, the guides gave her a Book of Mormon.
I was surprised to hear that the tour guides knew nothing about Brigham Young’s plural wives because the one time I toured there a couple decades ago, this was not the case, and Brigham Young practicing polygamy is common knowledge and not even really controversial. On the contrary, it’s probably the only thing most of my non-LDS friends knew about Mormons before they met me. How is it possible that tour guides at his home don’t know these facts?
I would highly recommend taking this tour while in Salt Lake City. There is no charge for the tour and we found it to be rather interesting. It takes about 20 minutes to see all of the well preserved antiquities in all the rooms belonging to Bingham Young and his wife. The guides were knowledgeable regarding Mr. Young’s life history. Would recommend. – TripAdvisor review from Feb 2018. Note the use of “wife” to describe Brigham Young’s living arrangements. No ma’am, that’s not history.
The answer lies in a change to the approach for the church’s historical sites which are now run by the missionary department. Salt Lake City missionaries who function as tour guides in Temple Square and sites like the Beehive House are often young sister missionaries, some of whom are from foreign countries where information about early Mormon polygamy and history are not well-known (as they have been stricken from correlated teaching materials).[1] Even if they are not foreign born, young adult missionaries grew up on correlated lesson manuals and may lack awareness of early Mormon history. Whether they lack that knowledge or not, they are given information as tour guides that has neatly redacted all references to polygamy.[2] In Brigham Young’s home! Where he lived with his many wives! And is buried nearby with five of them!
When my husband and I took the tour most recently, two young sister missionaries were our guides. They were very nice, but they did not know much about the house or its history at all, and much of the tour was spent proselytizing. However, my husband had taken the tour before, and the guides were an older senior missionary couple who knew a lot about the house and made the tour a meaningful window into the church’s past and its earth-moving leader. – Tripadvisor review from Oct 2017. tl;dr YMMV. While older couples may be more knowledgeable, there doesn’t seem to be much effort to educate the younger missionaries serving.
This article was discussed in a few Facebook forums where various visitors to the Beehive House confirmed the current misinformation trend, including a few other interesting tidbits of history:
- Brigham Young’s bedroom is pointed out as is his “wife’s” bedroom. No explanation is given for all the other bedrooms.
- When pressed, a tour guide assured the visitor that Brigham Young had only had two wives, and that the second one was after his first wife had already died.
- Guides explain that it was common for wives and husbands to have separate bedroom, which is not factually correct, but was certainly true in polygamous households.
- A family portrait showing Brigham with one wife and a few children is displayed, implying that’s his only wife.
- Missionaries stated that Brigham Young was home every night for family prayer.
- One guide stated that Brigham Young gathered his family in the parlour for Family Home Evening every Monday! (Family Home Evening was instituted in 1915, 38 years after Brigham Young’s death, according to lds.org).
- Another tour guide wishfully stated that Mark Twain really liked the Mormons.[3]
- One commenter mentioned that tour guides barely spoke English, certainly not well enough to understand the types of questions they were getting, even if they had known the history.
- Someone shared that he knew a missionary who served there who had been instructed not to answer any difficult questions and only to bear testimony at the end of the tour. Despite this, she was asked very difficult questions by tourists about practices related to polygamy that she didn’t know how to answer.
- One tour guide confided that when any non-members are present on the tour, they don’t mention polygamy. [4]
Today, tours focus on going through the house quickly with a minimum of commentary, no mention of polygamy (there was some report of false claims that he did not practice polygamy), testimony bearing, and a plea for referral cards at the end. This sounds like missionary work, but it definitely doesn’t sound like a tour of a historical site, in which case, the tours doubtless feel like a bait and switch to both LDS and non-LDS visitors alike. On the upside, it’s a free tour, and visitors are pressed to take a free Book of Mormon with them. On the downside, it seems to be irritating a lot of tourists.
The tour is given by Mormon sisters, and while they do a good job pointing out features of the house, they spend equal time preaching about religion and reading from the Book of Mormon. The worst parts were when they requested group participation and responses to questions about faith and everyone stood around awkwardly trying to avoid eye contact. – TripAdvisor review from Oct 2017.
Several noted that the tours at Brigham Young’s summer residence in St. George are much better, and that the tours given at the Beehive House in the past were far better and included interesting facts about the house, one of the attractions of the tour in the first place. A few interesting facts people noted from prior tours:
- Brigham had each wife sit in the snow so he could hand carve a wooden dining chair to custom fit that wife. Children visiting the house could then sit in the various chairs to see how different each one was.
- Tours explained how work was divided in a polygamous household.
- A former tour guide shared that each guide was given the book Brigham Young at Home written by one of his daughters that was full of facts about the house.
- I recall from my tour being told that he had 27 wives and 56 children.
For anyone who wishes to know more about the real history, check out the Year of Polygamy podcast.
From an article in the Deseret News about the new Church History Museum renovation, Kurt Graham, the museum’s curator, said:
“We want members of the church and people outside of the church who are looking for information to get a very consistent message. We don’t want them to hear one thing in the museum and then something else on the church’s internet site and something else at a historic site and something else in the Smith papers. It’s all one message. We want to coordinate that so that the real, latest scholarship we’re aware of is available in all of these venues, in all of these channels, for the public.”
This clearly doesn’t apply to the Beehive House, or at least not as it’s currently being run by the missionary department. And that’s a wasted opportunity.
As I saw at Kirtland, you can infuse accurate history with manufactured spiritual experiences; that would certainly be preferable to white-washing the entire historical narrative or replacing it with misinformation that makes ill-informed tour guides more comfortable.
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[1] Which is fine by me – I don’t want to talk about polygamy at church any more than anyone else does! But not talking about it while giving tours of Brigham Young’s home makes zero sense.
[2] Too bad we can’t actually remove polygamy from history, but that would require a time machine.
[3] This is presumably the same Mark Twain who said “Am I a friend to the Mormon religion? No. I would like to see it extirpated. . . . If you can destroy it with a book, — by arguments and facts, not brute force, — you will do a good and wholesome work. And I should be very far from unwilling to publish such a book” and who called Joseph Smith “a man of no repute and of no authority.” With friends like these . . .
[4] Let’s get real. What non-LDS person is visiting the Beehive House who doesn’t already know that he had multiple wives?? Isn’t that the whole purpose of touring the house for non-LDS visitors? For a lascivious look at the inner workings of a polygamous household?
Wheat & Tares 
The Lion House was also built about the same time and was also an official residence of Brigham Young. No one ever talks about the fact that those two residences were both used by one man with many wives.
I had thought BY lived in the Lion House and simply kept some of his favorite wives at the Beehive House. But .. I don’t really know and the church doesn’t discuss it.
I visited Kirtland late last year and was impressed by both the LDS and CoC tours. The CoC tour of the temple was done by a retired brother from (I believe) Canada. I really enjoyed how he mixed faith with fact, and we got to sing the Spirit of God in the first floor room which was exhilarating. Likewise, the two young sister missionaries did a very good job of describing the Whitney store. It was easy to tell that their job was to proselytize, but I sensed that they had a better understanding of the complexities of Church history than the sisters described above. That being said, I didn’t start grilling them about Fanny Alger and the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company either, but then that wasn’t my purpose for going to see Kirtland.
The misinformation is troubling, but I wonder how much of it stems from misunderstanding by either or both the young missionary tour guides and the visitors. (That is not to say that ignorance, assumptions, or even instruction to avoid some topics could not also contribute to those TripAdvisor reports. Those reports are certainly different from my decades-past visits to the Beehive House.)
It seems that only two of BY’s wives ever lived in the Beehive house and that they did not live there at the same time. Lucy had 9 children and the Beehive House also accommodated a number of guests during BY’s life. It was also expanded significantly after his death. Prurient interest in the number of bedrooms at the Beehive House may be misplaced.
“Young lived there with his wife Mary Ann Angell, who moved back to the White House, a separate property owned by Brigham Young in Salt Lake City “about a block east of the Lion House.” Lucy Ann Decker and her children moved into the house in 1860 and Lucy remained there until the end of Brigham’s life. …
Brigham Young is known to have had at least 56 plural wives, as confirmed by the LDS Family History Archives. Only one wife and her children ever lived at the Beehive house at a time. Others lived in other homes owned by Young, many lived at the nearby Lion House. Spencer recorded that ‘there were usually about twelve families living in the Lion House.’ ”
http://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/47?tour=2&index=8
Really useful clarification JR, which acknowledges BY’s polygamy and contextualises the house. How interesting that would be to visitors were it shared. Not being frank does us no favours, and will hardly be part of someone’s true conversion process sadly.
Humans believe what they want to believe, especially 19 year old missionaries. I feel bad for them, but not in the way you might assume. Three good friends of mine are returned missionaries who have all left the LDS church within the last five years. One of the reasons they tell me is that they feel that helps “makes up” for all the false teachings they shared with people during their missions such as false church history regarding polygamy. My experience is that it’s better to know the truth earlier than be body slammed with it later.
I travel to SLC quite often and will have to visit the Beehive House and see for myself.
I have noticed a similar change in the way historical tours are given at other sites (upstate NY, Harmony, and Nauvoo). Up until a few years ago, I saw no proselyting on tours (except, perhaps, a simple testimony at the end – but it was about the individual, place, or event concerned, not about the Gospel in general). But in the last year or two, it is increasingly a walk through an old building with readings from the Book of Mormon along the way, and little historical information. That’s especially true of Harmony, one of the more recently-revised historic sites.
You can even see the change in the architecture. Reconstructions in Salt Lake and Nauvoo tend to be close to period (more or less), but in Harmony, they have taken Nineteenth Century floor plans and polished them up with modern trim (glossy finishes, machined molding, carpet, etc.). There’s a haphazard scattering of period furniture, but mostly it feels like a hybrid of the “family rooms” in the visitors centers and the (attempted) historical reconstruction. I suspect some of the PTB , in an unwitting homage to the Prosperity Gospel, decided that a room has to feel new in order allow the Spirit to be be unrestrained.
We have some great history to tell, and some great religion to preach. But doing both at once doesn’t serve either very well.
My recent visit to Liberty Jail was as Gadflown describes. Lots of proselyting, little history. Multiple requests for tour members to relate faith promoting stories and share testimony. I did not find it a positive experience.
I just went to the Beehive House tour and was not impressed with the tour overall. The young Sisters seemed to know a few historic facts, but not much detail and their historic fact often seemed to be the ‘lead in’ to an opportunity to bear testimony of the church or ask for anyone interested in a Book of Mormon. It made me feel sorry for my fellow tourists who did not appear to be LDS and patiently put up with this until they were permitted to move on to the next room. Only the ground floor was toured so you didn’t really get any appreciation for the housing of a large family. The emphasis was more on the home’s function as the office of the President of the Church.
I had an experience like that at the Beehive House that I mention briefly in the linked post. I’ve been through the tour many times, and when I was a boy it was outstanding. The docents used to be senior sisters who knew their stuff and conveyed lots of interesting detail.. Now it’s not even worth bothering with. The PTB don’t know what they’re doing; you can’t rewrite history with BY as a monagamist. People aren’t actually that stupid.
https://bycommonconsent.com/2012/08/04/the-education-of-a-blogger/
So here’s a piece I did about ten years ago on LDS historical sites, based on a presentation by one of the LDS officials running the program. At that time, the Historical Sites group acquired a site, did the renovations, and wrote the historical script, and only then did the Missionary Dept. take over the operation of the site and staff it with volunteers and missionaries. It sounds like either the Missionary Dept. now writes the scripts, or else Site Directors have elected to just ignore the historical material they are given and tell the missionaries to proselyte, period.
http://www.timesandseasons.org/harchive/2007/08/lds-historical-sites/
“People aren’t actually that stupid.”. Actually they are. And worse. Us. See below.
I have not been in the Beehive house for at least 10 years. The last time was when I took a Protestant minister there and the tour guide was a cute sister missionary from Japan.She was from one of the very cities to which I was assigned to work when I was on my mission there, a tender mercy. My Japanese language skills returned somewhat miraculously and the minister was extremely impressed as we talked in both languages. However, she knew almost nothing about church history or polygamy. Obviously, a minister in Utah knows about these things. Mormons leaving the church and attending his services tell him. He was rather giving her the tour from a new perspective while I translated and confirmed. I think our conversation really shook up her testimony. No way to avoid it..
As a missionary in Japan we went on splits with sister missionaries and local branch sister missionaries, usually 2 sisters with 1 elder for about 1 hour. Then we would reconvene with our companion and the other 2 elders we lived with and mix and match in a different combination. At one door, this dude said to me in near perfect English, “are these your two wives?” I said in Japanese, “I don’t speak English. I am from Germany.” Stupid move. He spoke German and asked me in German something and I could not say or understand one German word.
One of the sisters understood his English and explained we were not married and that the LDS church would never condone such a thing as plural marriage. He asked me in English,” don’t you think you need to tell them the truth? You know it yourself, the Mormons practiced polygamy and you might even be descended from polygamists.” (True, 19 of 32 ancestors 5 generations back to be exact.) I let both sisters defend “their truth” tenaciously. He called us liars and shut his door. I also made a mental note to tell our native Japanese mission president about this and leave it to him to do damage control. I hope he knew about polygamy. Pretty much made me into a chicken-shit liar.
It would appear that the missionary department practices at these historical sites are setting up the missionaries for similar “faith-promoting” encounters on a perpetual basis. Lugner or dummkopf, those are their choices.
My mother lived in the Beehive House, not as a plural wife, but as a student at LDS Business College, circa 1950ish. It was a dormitory at that time. The house was remodeled many times for various uses. My mother claimed that several of the girls living there were gay or at least bisexual. One night my mother was out past curfew with my father before they were married. She was a strong farm girl and was climbing up the back of the house to get in the second story window when Joseph Fielding Smith caught them. He cussed them out (he was reported to have used some d***, s*** and h*** words) and my mother almost got kicked out of the dormitory. My father always wondered what in the heck a senior apostle was doing lurking around the BACK of the girls dorm after midnight. Having served in the US Navy during WWII, he could think of a few things… But he didn’t bother to ask him.
Oh, the tales that old house could tell if it had ears, a memory and a tongue. Especially if there is anything to the written testimony of Ann Eliza Webb Dee Young Denning. Wife #19 or was it 27 or 47?