Carthage

We stayed in Keokuk at the Hampton Inn for our first night. It took me forever to get the pack and play set up for Caleb to go to bed. Then I put the lap top on the desk and put on Nemo and he fell asleep after like 20 minutes. I laye in bed with the TV on the NBA game and the volume turned down all the way and he didn't really notice. The ext morning we didn't even wake up until 9am, we went down stairs to hear a lot of "where did he get that red hair" comments.

Then we headed out toward Nauvoo. The very first thing I wanted to do was go to Carthage. I always felt that if I was in that room where the martyrdom occured, I would have a very emotial experience knowing that The Prophet of the Restoration was killed there.


It was cool to see up close these buildings where the historic events actually occured. I kept asking, "is this original... were the floors replaced.." etc, etc. I always thought that when I entered the room where the prophet had been killed I would be overcome with emotion, but it didn't happen that way. The Senior Missionary who took us up to the room and recounted the events of those couple of days in the jail mentioned that some of the blood that had been on the floor had been cleaned up because the Church wanted people to focus on the restoration of the gospel and not on the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum. He alo mentioned that at one point there had been some glass over the blood on the floor. But when people starting bringing in their pocket knives and chipped away at it, they just had it removed.

I also wondered why there were stars on the outside of the building. When the Church came in to restore the jail, they drove steel rods throught he cabin with big nuts on the ends and the stars acted like washers to keep the building more stable, but they were really more of a decoration than anything else though.

I also didn't know that when they came to the site they couldn't find the well outside of the bedroom window where Joseph fell and and was propped up against even though he was already dead. They dug and dug and eventually found it and placed the cover that is on it today.