Description

Miracles at Laie

President Joseph F. Smith dedicated the ground for the Laie Hawaii temple on June 1, 1915. It was announced to and sustained by the general membership of the Church on October 3, 1915.

Work began immediately to remove I Hemolele, the large chapel that the saints had constructed. Because they had nothing more than jacks and timbers and 20 husky Hawaiians to move it down the hill, it took until March 1916 to relocate it. Finally, they were successful and the eminent site on the hill was ready for a temple.[1]

The decision was made to build the temple core of concrete using crushed lava rock as the aggregate. Work commenced and by June, was well underway. Historians Eric-Jon K. Marlowe and Clinton Christensen have underscored the miracle of this temple’s construction.

The Hawaii Temple was essentially built without the use of heavy equipment. And although they were talented and teachable, most of the Hawaiian Church members who built the temple were, at least initially, unskilled in the trades required to construct such a modern building. Further, many of the specialized workers were young (architect Harold Burton, construction supervisor Ralph Woolley, cement builder Walter Spalding, sculptor Avard Fairbanks, and artist LeConte Stewart were all in their twenties), and though they were well educated, they were relatively untested in the particular tasks the temple’s construction demanded. What’s more, from moving the chapel to make way for the temple to the planting of grass on the temple grounds (June 1918), construction took about two and a half years. In contrast, the simultaneous construction of the Alberta Temple took ten years (1913 to 1923) to complete.[21] That the building of the Hawaii Temple could be achieved with such quality while using mostly unskilled labor in markedly remote conditions without the use of heavy equipment, be financed entirely in Hawaiʻi, and be completed within two and a half years while enduring various delays really was quite miraculous. However, the ultimate miracle is what that cumulative effort, with divine assistance, produced—a magnificent edifice eminently suited to its purpose as a house of the Lord.[2]

There is one other miraculous moment oft-mentioned in relation to the construction of the Hawaii temple. Somewhere around the end of 1916 or early 1917, the wood to build the forms to pour the concrete ran short. World War I ravaged Europe and lumber was in short supply. The walls of the Temple were reportedly about halfway up when the supply ran out. According to Romania Wooley, wife of construction foreman, Ralph Wooley,

“At this point, [Ralph Woolley] was desperate. He climbed up . . . in the steeple of the belfry of the old Laie church. . . . and pled with the Lord. ‘Tell me what to do. Where can I get some lumber?’ . . . Oh about two days passed, and he heard a commotion in the village—people were running to the sea. . . A freighter had run aground on the reef out at Goat Island.” He learned that the ship was “full of lumber.” But the captain couldn’t let him have any of it without permission of “the agents in Honolulu.” When Woolley told them of the conditions, the agent supposedly said, “‘You can have all the lumber you want for nothing, if you can get it off the ship.’”

She said that Wooley organized a group of swimmers to get the lumber off the boat. Romania continued.

“Those wonderful Hawaiian young kids threw the lumber off piece by piece. It was lugged up to the temple grounds and [Ralph] started to finish the temple. And it didn’t cost the Church a cent. But here’s the interesting thing: When they got all the lumber they wanted. Like an unseen force—there [were] no tug oats because everything had been taken from the harbors—that boat righted itself and slid off the reef and went into Honolulu.”[3]

So much about the Laie Hawaii Temple is a miracle, perhaps especially how it makes you feel when you visit for the first time. It is magnificent.

Sources:

[1] https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4351&context=etd p. 68

[2] https://rsc.byu.edu/laie-hawaii-temple-century-aloha/temple-grounds-completion#_edn20

[3] https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4351&context=etd p. 86