Brigham City Tabernacle is one of the finest examples of nineteenth century Latter-day Saint architecture and for more than a century has served as a center of Christian worship, cultural enrichment, and community activities, becoming one of the region's principal landmarks. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints settled the area in 1851 under the leadership of Elder Lorenzo Snow of the Council of the Twelve Apostles and built the town at the mouth of Box Elder Canyon near traditional Shoshone Indian campgrounds, naming it for Church President Brigham Young. After years of worship in a log meetinghouse and the local courthouse, Brigham Young directed Elder Snow and other community leaders in 1865 to build a tabernacle for conferences of the Box Elder Stake. Although local leaders had selected a central in-town site, tradition holds that Brigham Young chose Sagebrush Hill, the highest point on Main Street, so the building would be visible for many miles across the valley. Brigham Young and Territorial Surveyor Jesse W. Fox laid the cornerstones on 9 May 1865, but construction advanced slowly while local manpower was diverted to the transcontinental railroad. Work resumed in earnest in 1876, largely through donated labor, with local craftsmen using quartzite, sandstone, and lumber from nearby mountains, while women donated garden produce and eggs laid on Sundays to raise cash for glass and other materials not available locally. Fourteen years after the cornerstones were laid, the first meeting in the partially completed building took place on 27 May 1879. Plain but sturdy at first, the building was further improved after an 1889 Box Elder Stake conference voted to complete it by adding a tower, gallery, rear vestibule, brick buttresses with decorative caps, and other beautifying features, and Church President Wilford Woodruff dedicated the finished building on 28 October 1890. On Sunday, 9 February 1896, a fire that began in the furnace room destroyed the tabernacle, leaving only smoke-blackened stone walls, though no one was injured. Stake President Rudger Clawson oversaw reconstruction during the next thirteen months, producing an even finer building with elegant woodwork, a distinctive gothic-revival tower, and sixteen pinnacles, and George Q. Cannon, first counselor to President Woodruff, dedicated the rebuilt structure on 21 March 1897. In later years, people of Brigham City and neighboring towns preserved and maintained the building; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, and beginning in 1985 an extensive restoration renewed its systems and structure and carefully restored its exterior and interior. The 106-year-old tabernacle was rededicated on 12 April 1987 by Elder Boyd K. Packer, a Brigham City native.