Returning Home

One night about twenty years ago, I had a dream that I was in the attic of my grandfather’s childhood home. Even though nothing in the dreamscape looked familiar, my internal navigational system (so faulty in real life) told me exactly where I was. It was a strangely specific setting, given that I had visited this house exactly once, during a cross-country road trip with my grandparents when I was 9. We stopped in Nauvoo, Illinois, to visit Grandpa’s brother Joe and his wife Jean, who still lived in the old family home. We stayed for a few days, but during that time I never went into the attic. 

The house faced an empty town square that was the former site of a Mormon temple. Nauvoo was the last of several places where Joseph Smith and his followers attempted to establish their American Zion before fleeing to Utah. While the temple was in the final stages of construction in 1844, Joseph Smith was killed by an angry mob, and within two years all the Mormons were run out of town. A remnant hastily dedicated the temple and performed as many sacred ceremonies as possible before hitching up their oxen to head west. The barely-used building was devastated by arsonists a few years later, and in 1850 a tornado felled the remaining exterior walls.

It was a few more decades before my great-great-grandfather Joseph A. Nelson built a home on the square in the 1880s, and by the time my grandfather was born in 1926 the Mormons were just a memory. My dad spent childhood summers in Nauvoo visiting his grandmother, and he and his brother sometimes dug in the grass for old temple stones. When I made my trip there in 1987, everything had long been excavated.

At the turn of this last century, the Latter-Day Saints started planning their return to Nauvoo. The president of the church announced intentions to rebuild the temple on the original parcel of land, which the church had quietly acquired several decades earlier. In 2002, the new Nauvoo Temple was dedicated and a million Mormon visitors started pouring in every year to make pilgrimage to the site of Joseph Smith’s martyrdom. Hotels and restaurants were suddenly full in this small town with 1,000 permanent residents, and real estate prices started to rise. The LDS Church started building brick replicas of many of the historic pioneer homes and set its sights on more property in Nauvoo. Before the new temple opened, they came to my great-uncle Joe with a generous offer to buy our family home. 

I was finishing college at the time and still building back my relationship with my dad after my parents’ divorce, so I wasn’t very clued into news on the Nelson side of the family, but then I had my dream about the house. The dream didn’t have much of a plot, but there was an energy from being in that very particular place that continued to tug at me after I woke up. I called my dad the next day to tell him about it and asked if anything had happened with the Nauvoo house. I learned that my dad’s brother and his wife had flown to Illinois to plead with Uncle Joe to keep the house in the family, promising to pay him $1 more than whatever the Mormons offered. Probably to spite my grandpa, who had left home for college almost 60 years earlier and relinquished his share of responsibility for the family business, Uncle Joe had sold the house to the Mormons.

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A couple years later, my husband and I drove to Iowa to help his grandparents move out of their home of many years into an assisted living facility. As we started to head back to Tennessee, I took a closer look at the (paper) map of our route and realized that we would pass within an hour of Nauvoo. As far as anyone knew the old family house was still intact, but it seemed like only a matter of time before the Mormons would tear it down to build a visitors center or historic replica on that prime real estate. Aware that the back of our car was full of boxes of china and quilts and other mementos from my husband’s family, evidence of how quickly decades of family history could be upended, I demanded we take a detour. I wanted to see the family house one more time.

As we drove into town, I called my dad on my new clamshell phone to get directions to the house. He didn’t actually remember the address but said it wouldn’t be hard to find – just look for the bigass temple on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River and the house would be across the street on the southern side. Ever the extrovert, he advised me to “just go knock on the door” when we got there.

We drove into Nauvoo at dusk and, as promised, easily located the 100-foot-tall white building, illuminated by flood lights from the base of its massive columns to the gold angel perched on top. And there in its shadow was the family house, still standing and apparently occupied. After I timidly rang the doorbell, an elderly woman answered the door and cheerfully welcomed us inside. She and her husband were retirees on a one-year missionary assignment to Nauvoo. Mormons are masters of genealogy, so she immediately identified me and my place in the family tree. She invited us in to look around the house.

My childlike memories of being there were now more than a decade old and as dim as my dream. I vaguely remembered thick mint-green carpet and flowery wallpaper, which had long been replaced. Nothing sparked even the slightest recognition until I stepped into a hallway with dark wood paneling and a stairway to the second floor. When I confessed my lack of connection to the kind missionary, who was following me around hoping I would drop more crumbs of family history, she exclaimed: “Well I bet you want to go see the attic, don’t you?”

Before I could reply to ask how she could possibly know that, she led the way up two flights of stairs. It looked nothing like my dream, or like anywhere I had been before. A space like this would have been unforgettable: all over the low ceilings and walls were dozens and dozens of handwritten signatures and dates. The tradition had apparently started with my dad and his brother, who had been a particularly enthusiastic and prolific signator (STEVE 1968! STEVE 1970!), during their summers in Nauvoo. I found the names of their cousins and, more recently, my sister and our cousins when they made their own cross-country trip with our grandparents a few years after I did. They had brought my dad and my uncle along for that trip. After the house passed into the church’s hands, Mormon missionaries had started adding their own inscriptions. My husband and I searched high and low for any trace of my name, even though I knew we wouldn’t find it. 

There were no signatures going back farther than my dad and his brother when they were kids, and I wonder if my grandpa and Uncle Joe ever even knew what graffiti was being created right above their heads by their children. If they did, it didn’t register as anything particularly important – after all, they had decades of history in the house before the attic inscriptions began, so when I was there no one thought to take me up to the attic to make my mark. My husband asked if I wanted to sign the wall then, but no one could find a pen. It was just as well. I didn’t like the idea of signing it like the enthusiastic young missionaries who were only there for a season. 

As we drove away from town, I marveled that even though I had never before set foot in that attic or even known of that particular tradition, my vivid dream had located me in that exact spot where my family had left its mark.

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As it turns out, that wasn’t my last visit to the Nauvoo house. My grandfather died in January 2020, and after waiting out the worst of COVID my family was able to travel to Nauvoo the next yearl to take some of his ashes back there. Though Grandpa had lived in southern Nevada for more than six decades, as his dementia progressed the memories that rose to the surface of his clouded brain were the oldest ones. For the last year of his life he thought he was in Nauvoo more often than not. 

By now, Nauvoo is kind of a Mormon Williamsburg. There is a whole village of historic homes (some reconstructed, most replicas), all staffed by elder missionaries in period garb. You can take a tour in a horse-drawn buggy, learn to steer an ox cart, or have a ring made at the working blacksmith shop. The visitors center has an intricate dollhouse-sized replica of the temple, along with many artifacts from the original building.

And the old Nelson house is still there, even though its immediate neighbors have been replaced by a temple welcome center and a genealogical research station. It’s now plastered in yellow vinyl siding, which is covering one of the windows of the upstairs room where my dad stayed every summer. After we headed to the backyard with our little film canister of Grandpa’s ashes to surreptitiously sprinkle some of him under a tree, we peeked in the windows of the house and discovered that the bottom level had been transformed into what looked like the common area of a college dorm: generic kitchen cabinets, boxy wooden furniture, a white board with a chore chart.

Soon a minivan pulled into the driveway and half a dozen young female missionaries piled out, returning from work in their costumes. They greeted us with the enthusiastic politeness we’d come to expect from the Saints, and we explained who we were and asked if we could take my nieces up to the attic to sign their names. The young women explained that they had just moved into the house earlier that week, so they weren’t familiar with the custom, and they apologized that church policies prohibited allowing anyone inside missionary housing. One of them diplomatically offered up her notebook for my nieces to write their names on a piece of paper, which she promised to tape to the wall. Another, still dressed in her calico pioneer dress, used my iPhone to take a photo of all of us in front of the house.

We moved on to the small city cemetery, where my nieces did cartwheels around the graves of their great-great-great grandparents and we spread more of Grandpa's remains beside the brother whose spiteful decision gave away the home that  generations of our family had lived in. 

There were Nelsons in Nauvoo for the better part of two centuries, and now our only real reason to return would be to visit those graves. But I am also reminded that the old house still looks directly onto a plot of land whose history was buried for 150 years. We never know what lies below the surface of any memory, and we never know where we will be called in a dream.