MANTI, Utah-The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is set to begin the open house for the Manti Utah Temple.
The public open house for the historic temple in central Utah will run from Thursday, March 14, through Friday, April 5, 2024, excluding Sundays. The temple rededication will be held on Sunday, April 21, 2024.
Free reservations can be scheduled online.
The Manti Temple Open House Coordinators are Scott and Janice Hintze. Scott commented, “We’re all procrastinators and this is only three weeks, so you better get here. If you get online and it shows that it’s booked, just come anyway.”
Janice talked about what people will get to see when they come to the temple, “They will be able to go down the grand hall, up the spiral staircase to the assembly room, through the baptistry, through the ordinance rooms, sealing rooms and the celestial room.”
Scott also mentioned that it is 95 steps up the staircase to the assembly room and that if people come that can’t climb up and down those stairs there will be a shorter tour of just the main floor.
Most of the current renovations have been to upgrade building systems and support spaces in the annex and to preserve the sacred structure. A new entrance and gathering space were added on the north side of the annex along with a bride-and-groom exit. The landscape was upgraded with new plants and trees throughout the site.
Many people that have been through the temple before will see only a few changes, Emily Utt, Historic Sites Curator for the Church History Department, said most of the renovations were done to keep the building safe, open and accessible.
However, Utt also talked about the restoration and preservation of the historic murals. “The Creation Room mural that has been here since 1886 and it just needed some love, it needed some attention. We cleaned that mural intensively it took several months of careful, meticulous work to remove all of the later renovations to that mural so we could see the original and very slowly build up repairs. When you go in that room today it looks just like it did when CCA Christensen painted it in the 1880’s. We found a bird that had disappeared from the layers of stuff covering that mural.”
Utt also said, “I hope they don’t recognize much change at all. They might come in and notice a new paint color. What I want them to feel when they come here is that they feel like they have come home.”
