14 Enough Water: Baptism, an Ever Changing Quality

From Joseph Smith to Howard W. Hunter, every president of the Church was baptized outdoors and not in a font. Only in recent times have we had convenient baptismal fonts with clean tile, warm and clean water, dressing rooms, and white baptismal clothes. Baptism requires sufficient water to submerge a person completely, and finding suitable places was not always easy or convenient. In hot, arid deserts and polar regions with freezing temperatures, finding enough water in which to immerse someone is difficult. Not until recent generations, however, has the Church used baptismal fonts in our meetinghouses. Before then, most baptisms were held outdoors in natural bodies of water.

Church history has many interesting stories of baptism that, being performed without fonts, seem unusual by our modern standards. On the day the Church was organized, April 6, 1830, several people hiked from Peter Whitmer’s log house down to the shores of nearby Seneca Lake. Among those baptized were Martin Harris and Joseph Smith Sr. The Prophet Joseph stood on the shore and watched; why he did not personally perform the ordinances is not known.

When Joseph Sr. came forth out of the water, Joseph Jr. was overjoyed. He took his father’s hand and exclaimed with tears of happiness, “Oh, my God! Have I lived to see my own father baptized into the true church of Jesus Christ!” Joseph was so filled with the Spirit to see his father and Martin Harris baptized that “he burst out with grief and joy and seemed as though the world could not hold him. He went out into the lot and appeared to want to get out of sight of everybody and would sob and cry and seemed to be so full that he could not live.” The Prophet’s “joy seemed to be full.”

At Colesville, New York, soon after the Church was organized, Joseph Smith conducted a baptism. On a Saturday afternoon, he and three others waded into a stream and, probably with rocks, tree limbs, and logs, “erected a dam across a stream of water” to create a pool big enough for baptisms. But a mob later ripped the dam out and ruined the standing pool. Two days later, the Saints rebuilt the dam and thirteen were baptized.

John Smith, the brother of Joseph Smith Sr., had been feeble in health for six years and was unable to even walk to his barn. Neighbors believed that baptism would kill him. His son, George A. Smith, not yet baptized himself, “cut the ice in the creek and broke a road for forty rods through the crust of two feet of snow, and the day was very cold.” Neighbors watched the baptism and were astonished that John survived the freezing experience—they expected him to die in the water. After the baptism, his health began to improve.

Within weeks of arriving in Preston, England, American elders had converts ready for baptism. But where could they perform the ordinance? They picked the River Ribble that ran through Preston. On July 30, 1837, a Sunday morning, they met together on the river’s shore. Hundreds of curious Sunday strollers gathered to watch. Two of the baptismal candidates ran a foot race to the water’s edge to see who would be baptized first. George D. Watt, the younger and the quicker of the two, won, and has become known in Church history as the first convert baptized in England.

George D. Watt was the first person to be baptized in England. He won the honor by racing another baptismal candidate to the River Ribble in Preston, England, on July 30, 1837. Courtesy Church Archives.

Because Nauvoo was bordered on three sides by the curving Mississippi River, many baptisms took place in the river. On March 20, 1842, for example, Joseph Smith preached at the regular Nauvoo outdoor Sunday meeting and then about 2:00 pm he went to the river’s edge near his home. A crowd of Saints lined the river bank. Joseph waded out into the river and baptized eighty persons “for the remission of sins.”

Many children and converts were baptized in the Nauvoo Temple’s baptismal font. The font, being in the basement, was one of the first parts of the temple finished, and it was put to use immediately. Constructed of pine timber, the font stood in the center of the basement room. It was oval shaped—sixteen feet long east and west, twelve feet wide, and four feet deep. The font rested on twelve wooden oxen, carved out of pine plank, glued together, “and copied after the most beautiful five-year-old steer that could be found in the country.” A temporary frame building was built around the font. Water came from a well dug in the basement.

Baptisms also occurred in unique and unlikely places such as aboard ocean-going vessels. Many sailing ships, chartered by the Church, carried Mormon converts from England to America. On board the Saints sometimes converted nonmember crewmen or passengers. How were converts baptized aboard a sailing ship at sea? During the 1851 voyage of the sailing ship Olympus, some fifty people were converted and baptized during two shipboard baptisms. In the first, the crew brought a large water barrel on deck, removed the top and put short ladders inside and out. They filled the barrel waist-deep with sea water. Elders baptized twenty-one persons, male and female, in the barrel.

A second baptism service, of twenty males, took place in the ocean itself. The ship’s main hatch cover was suspended by ropes on the ocean’s bobbing surface to make a floating platform. The man performing the baptism sat on the platform with legs in the water wearing a safety rope around his body. Each convert descended to the platform by rope ladder, with a safety rope around his body and a stout belt around his waist. He sat to the left of the elder officiating, who grasped the belt around the waist by the right hand, and the clothing at the back of the neck with the left. The candidate’s hands grasped the elder’s wrists. Then the convert “was placed beneath the briny wave and brought forth therefrom.”

An old photograph in the Church History Library depicts a baptism of Shivwitz Indians in southern Utah. Taken by photographer Charles Savage, it shows St. George Stake President Daniel P. McArthur, in knee-deep water, holding the wrist of an Indian who is about to be baptized. President McArthur is wearing nonwhite pants and a white shirt. On a slope behind the pond sit scores of curious Indians. Standing by the pond is Sheriff Augustus P. Hardy, probably acting as witness. Apparently the entire tribe of some 150 Indians were baptized during this service.

Daniel P. McArthur baptizing a Shivwitz Indian. Dozens of other tribe members were watching and waiting their turns. Sheriff Augustus P. Hardy looks on, possibly as a witness. Photograph by Charles R. Savage. Courtesy Perry Special Collections.

The day after he turned eight, young J. Reuben Clark climbed into a wagon with his family and they rode out to the warm springs, a cluster of brackish ponds in the alkali flats northwest of Grantsville, Utah. The water stung an individual’s eyes and tasted bitter, but it was warm and clear. His father baptized him on a ledge in one of the larger pools. Beyond the ledge, some folks said, the pool was bottomless. President Clark was baptized September 2, 1879.

A man in Nebo Stake was very ill and could only be baptized with great care. Someone created a special tank, filled it with warm water, and the sick man was gently baptized. But the person officiating did not stand inside the tank. People wondered if the baptism was valid. Church President Joseph F. Smith decided the man should be baptized again “in the proper way.”

Cottbus, forty miles south of Berlin, Germany, had no municipal swimming pool in the mid-1920s, so elders there baptized in the River Spree. Elder Robert Richard Burton described a cold November baptism there of thirty converts. “We found a rather isolated spot where there were trees growing,” he said. “The leaves were off the trees, snow was on the ground, and ice was on the river.” In a cove, the elders took branches and broke the thin sheets of ice so no one would be cut.

That night, after a prayer in an apartment, they walked to the river. “In the dark the ladies went upstream and the men went downstream and chanced their clothes, standing in their bare feet in the snow and putting on white robes,” Elder Burton said, “and banged their head[s] against the stove in order to thaw out those lumps on their heads.”

Another photograph in the Church History Library captures a 1947 baptismal service at a swimming pool in Utrecht in the Netherlands. It shows three dozen people, dressed in white clothes, who are sitting on chairs or standing along the side of a large, indoor pool.

Records show that all fourteen of the presidents of the Church were baptized out of doors. Exactly where Joseph Fielding Smith’s baptism occurred in still unclear, though records show that he was baptized in Salt Lake City on a hot July day in 1884, so undoubtedly he was baptized outdoors, probably in City Creek. Below lists the baptismal sites of the presidents:

During the nineteenth century, few Latter-day Saint meetinghouses had fonts. In larger Mormon communities, such as Salt Lake City, Provo, and St. George, one or more fonts were built for use in the winter.

In October 1856, the First Presidency dedicated a baptismal font located near the Endowment House in Salt Lake City. A year later, two Apostles dedicated a font in the city’s Fourteenth Ward. In 1861, Brigham Young had a wooden font erected a few rods east of his schoolhouse. About ten by twelve feet, the font was an old wagon bed, redesigned to hold water, with two dressing rooms attached. President Young dedicated it and then told local bishops “they were quite welcome to use it for baptizing, instead of the creek.”

In 1875, Bishop Frederick Kesler, a millwright, built a font for the Church for a special group of Indians who were visiting Salt Lake City. The font ran east-west so the officiator could stand facing south, letting the candidate rise facing east—copying a cemetery custom for people to be buried so they could rise in the resurrection facing east.

Brother Kesler’s font had running, not standing, water because he and many others then believed that baptisms should take place in running water, as Jesus was baptized. In 1881, Bishop Edwin D. Woolley “spoke in favor of a running stream of water for baptizing.”

Raised as a Quaker, Edwin D. Woolley joined the LDS Church and later served as a bishop for many years in the Thirteenth Ward in Salt Lake City. He often emphasized the need for Church members to pay tithes. Courtesy Church Archives.

The First Presidency a century ago urged parents to baptize their children as soon as they turned eight years old, even in winter when small children might be “afraid of the cold water,” rather than waiting several months. In 1902, Church President Joseph F. Smith said he knew that “there are perhaps not more than three or four months of the year when the temperature of the water in our streams makes the ordinance comfortable.” He therefore asked all stake presidents to build fonts in every “fair-sized” city, complete with dressing rooms and heated water.

In 1890 a new font was dedicated in the southwest portion of the Salt Lake Tabernacle. During most of this century, Salt Lake City stakes held monthly baptismal services at the Tabernacle. That font probably holds the Church record for the number of live baptisms performed.

Because fonts are dedicated, some people have wondered if rivers or lakes should be dedicated prior to being used for a baptism. “Water for baptism need not be dedicated,” the First Presidency instructed in 1932.

The Honolulu Tabernacle and grounds have been a tourist site in Hawaii for many years. One of its several outdoor courts once contained a popular baptismal font surrounded by a tropical garden and lily ponds that has been filled in and planted over with floral gardens.

By the 1930s some stakes constructed buildings that contained fonts, but outdoor baptisms were still common. Starting in the 1940s, it became standard for all new stake centers to have fonts. Recent building department policy has been that if people have to drive more than thirty minutes to use a font outside their branch or ward boundary, then their building can have its own font.

In the mid-1980s, several older people in Salt Lake City were asked where they were baptized. Locations they listed were: an ice pond in Humphrey, Idaho, in 1934; a creek in Mantua, Utah, in 1934; the Logan Temple in the 1920s; a canal in Cowley, Wyoming, about 1910; a baptistry in the Provo town park in 1939; and a mill pond in Lehi around 1920.

It is unknown when white baptismal clothes became the standard apparel for baptisms. A 1938 instruction regarding baptismal clothes, long after white clothes became standard, stated:

Persons presenting themselves for baptisms should be dressed in white clothing, which will permit the entire body to become wet as a result of the complete immersion. Bathing caps should be worn. Boots, waders, or other articles of clothing worn by persons officiating, for the purpose of keeping parts of the body dry are not in conformity with the spirit of the ordinance and should not be permitted. Today, stake Primary presidencies or mission officers supervise the buying, issuing, and cleaning of white, modest baptismal clothing.

Millions of people have been baptized by priests and elders in the Church. For more than 160 years, Church leaders gained experience and wisdom about baptismal services. They wanted people’s thoughts focused on the prayer, the spirit, and the importance of the ordinance, not on mud, ice, mosquitoes, or immodesty. Therefore, except in remote areas, elders baptize in warm, clean water in comfortable, indoor baptismal fonts at convenient locations.

This article was originally published in Mormon Heritage Magazine 1 (September/October 1994): 22, 24, 26–27.