How a small boulder bearing 1,200-year-old petroglyphs landed on the lawn of a Latter-day Saint meetinghouse in northern Utah remains a mystery.
According to local lore, it might have been the work of a group of (strong) men who, 80 years ago, hauled the 2,500-pound rock from its original resting place in the mountains to the Tremonton church building. Other stories pin the act on a band of (even stronger) Boy Scouts.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) An ancient petroglyph, created by the Fremont people, ancestors of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation in northern Utah, sat in front of the First Ward meetinghouse of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Tremonton for decades.
Either way, the sacred relic created by the Fremont people, ancestors of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, has sat in one spot or another on the meetinghouse’s grounds ever since.
That is, until earlier this month, when a team of experts hired by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints secured, cleaned and airlifted the stone back into place, nestled among other petroglyphs near the Utah-Idaho border (the exact location has not been disclosed in an effort to protect the boulder).
“Putting it back for us is putting a puzzle piece back into place,” Brad Parry, vice chair of the Northwestern Band, said in a church news release about the rock’s repatriation. “Our history is so fractured with a lot of things that happened to us. To have these positive things now that are coming out — it’s rebuilding our history. And I can’t overstate that.”
The process was far from simple or speedy, with amateur archaeologists first identifying its origins as far back as 2011.
“We’ve been working since about that time on getting everything to line up,” Ryan Saltzgiver, history sites curator for the Church History Department, said in the release, “so we could move the stone.”
Doing so, Saltzgiver stressed, represented not a legal but a “moral and ethical obligation” on the part of the church.
Key was bringing together all the affected parties, a process that took the Utah State Historic Preservation Office several years.
Then came removing the rock from the concrete foundation it had been affixed to and transporting it to Provo, where conservators handpicked by church historians gave it a careful scrubbing to remove as much of the lichen obscuring the petroglyphs as possible.
The delicate work included bamboo, plastic tools, nontoxic steam and biocide — on top of soap and water.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) This petroglyph, covered with lichen, was cleaned and preserved after being removed from a concrete slab at a Tremonton meetinghouse on December 8, 2025.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Conservators from the Midwest Art Conservation Center carefully clean and preserve this lichen-covered petroglyph on December 9, in Provo. Ancestors of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation created the engraving 1,200 years ago.
“There are not that many people out there who do this, which makes our work very interesting and varied,” Megan Randall, an objects conservator with the Midwest Art Conservation Center, said in the release. “[The stone] has designs that are spiritually connected to the tribe, and we want to make those visible.”
Those gathered for the artifact’s return described it as an affecting, even spiritual, experience. It included a blessing offered in Shoshone for all those who helped assist in the stone’s return.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) The petroglyph rock was repatriated by helicopter to its place of origin.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Members of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation pause for a blessing from a tribal spiritual leader during the repatriation of a sacred rock with petroglyphs created by their ancestors, the Fremont people.
“I felt a strong impression that the eyes of our ancestors were upon us in that moment — both Latter-day Saint and Shoshone,” David Bolingbroke, research and outreach historian for the Church History Department, said in the release. “They were pleased with our efforts to bring this stone back [and] put it in its rightful place.”