What happened to the Nauvoo Endowment after Joseph Smith’s death? What happens to a temple idea when a group won’t follow Brigham Young west? In this third conversation of the series, historian John Hamer and host Rick Bennett follow two small groups that carried the Nauvoo endowment in their own directions: one that kept it alive in a room above a church, and one that took it to Texas.
Don’t miss our other conversations with John: https://gospeltangents.com/people/john-hamer/
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Gospel Tangents
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Cutlerite Version of Nauvoo Endowment
John starts with Alpheus Cutler, one of the chief builders of the Nauvoo Temple and a member of the Council of Fifty. When Brigham Young chose the Salt Lake valley, Cutler felt the Council had given him a special mission to lead the saints to Jackson County instead, and he stayed behind. The break produced the Cutlerites. At first they practiced polygamy like Brigham Young’s followers, but then decided it was a terrible mistake and broke apart the plural families, which John calls amazing and hard to do. Modern Cutlerites, he says, have written that chapter out of their history. What they kept was the Nauvoo endowment.
At their headquarters in Manti, Iowa, the Cutlerites set apart an upper story that John calls an endowment house, modeled on Joseph Smith’s Red Brick Store, where the endowment was first given. When they moved north, they built a two-story building the same way, with a church on the bottom floor and an endowment room above, and they did it again when part of the group regathered in Jackson County. By the time missionaries from the Reorganization arrived, about half of the Cutlerites had joined them, and John notes there are no descendants of Cutler in the Cutlerite church but plenty in Community of Christ. That makes the Cutlerites, he says, the only group outside the Brigham Young-descended churches that still keeps a Nauvoo-era endowment, which is why more people want to study them than there are Cutlerites. Rick, who has interviewed them, says only a handful remain
Nauvoo Endowment in Texas!
Then the conversation turns to Texas. Lyman Wight was an apostle who had led Zion’s Camp and sat on the Council of Fifty, which gave him an ambassadorial role with the Republic of Texas as a possible safe haven for the saints. When Brigham Young went west, Wight decided to finish the Texas plan. John says Brigham Young’s answer was that every king in the Council of Fifty had the right to build his own kingdom, as long as he didn’t take anyone from Nauvoo. Wight gathered people from the pineries of Wisconsin and founded several relatively successful colonies.
Rick notes that the Wightites built the first temple west of the Mississippi, thirty years before St. George. John agrees they called it a temple but thinks of it more as an endowment house, a space in a church building set apart for rituals, and one that predates the others. Rick adds that historian Mel Johnson says it wasn’t closed to outsiders, and John suggests the closed-door tradition grew out of the conflict in Utah, while Texans welcomed the colony. The Wightites faded after Joseph Smith III came forward, and their descendants are now in Community of Christ. John adds that Wight’s journal was held at the Herald’s headquarters until the building burned, and Rick recalls that the RLDS Church suppressed temple records because of polygamy.
Together with parts 1 and 2, these stories show how far the temple idea traveled from Kirtland and Nauvoo, and part 3 shows that a temple can be a room upstairs. Next, in part 4, John turns to James Strang, the Strangites, and their fortress temple plans at Voree. Don’t forget to check out John’s book!
Listen to the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts.
Don’t miss our other conversations with John: https://gospeltangents.com/people/john-hamer/
Copyright © 2026
Gospel Tangents
All Rights Reserved
Chapters
0:43 Alpheus Cutler: Nauvoo Temple Builder & Council of Fifty
2:39 Cutlerites Drop Polygamy, Keep the Nauvoo Endowment
6:41 Church Below, Endowment Room Above: The Cutlerite Pattern
8:01 Only Cutlerites Kept a Nauvoo-Era Endowment — & Few Are Left
9:21 Lyman Wight: Zion’s Camp Captain & Council of Fifty
11:16 The Republic of Texas & the Council of Fifty’s Plan
13:11 The First Temple West of the Mississippi? Dedicated 1849
14:30 Was the Wightite Temple Open to Outsiders?
17:54 Wightites Rejoin: Suppressed Records & Lyman Wight’s Journal
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