The First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has released an artist’s exterior rendering of the Montpelier Idaho Temple, with its June 17 groundbreaking less than two months away.
The rendering was first published Monday, April 24, on ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
Elder Ryan K. Olsen, a General Authority Seventy, will preside at the groundbreaking services. Attendance at the groundbreaking will be by invitation only, with a live broadcast of the event to be available for the more than 15,000 Church members who reside within the proposed temple district, which includes congregations in southeast Idaho and neighboring Utah and Wyoming.
The groundbreaking date was announced seven weeks ago, on March 6.
The temple — planned to be about 27,000 square feet — will be built on a 2.6-acre site on the northeast corner of Washington and Sixth Street in Montpelier.
The Montpelier temple site and structure size were released in May 2022, less than seven weeks after the new temple for southeastern Idaho was announced by President Russell M. Nelson in April 2022 general conference. It was one of 17 new temple locations he identified at the time.
Montpelier’s previous city hall sat on the temple site but was torn down in March 2021. Several small homes elsewhere on the property have been moved.
Across 6th Street North to the west is the Montpelier Tabernacle, a 1,200-seat semicircular building constructed in 1917 with art deco, prairie and neoclassical architectural styles, which was renovated just prior to its centennial commemoration.
Once a stop on the old Oregon Trail, Montpelier is the largest community in the Bear River Valley, near where the borders of Idaho, Wyoming and Utah meet. The town was settled in 1864 by Latter-day Saint pioneers led by Apostle Charles C. Rich, with Brigham Young later giving it its current name, the same as the capital city of his birth state of Vermont.
With a population of less than 3,000 residents, the town is 10 miles west of the Idaho-Wyoming border. Located just north of Bear Lake, the town is 22 miles north of the Idaho-Utah border.
Home to more than 470,000 Latter-day Saints in more than 1,200 congregations, Idaho has eight other temples in operation, under construction or announced. Dedicated temples are found in Boise, Idaho Falls, Meridian, Pocatello, Rexburg and Twin Falls, with a temple under construction in Burley and the Rexburg’s second — the Teton River Idaho Temple — in planning and design.
