Young Heber J. Grant’s Years of Passage

As Heber J. Grant came of age, Mormonism was as much a part of the Utah landscape as the Territory’s dusty valleys and vaulting mountain walls. Young Heber met religion everywhere—in his Salt Lake City home and neighborhood, at the Tabernacle on Temple Square, in the offices of Church and civic leaders where he sometimes ventured, and certainly in his native Thirteenth Ward, one of the most innovative and organizationally developed Latter-day Saint congregations of the time. Slowly young Heber internalized his religious culture, but not before encountering the usual perils of adolescence and “coming of age.” The process tells a great deal about Heber himself, but also about the beliefs, rituals, and worship patterns of early Utah Mormonism.