Where you can see LDS founder Joseph Smith’s last letter to wife Emma — written on the day he died

Visitors to the Church History Museum in downtown Salt Lake City now can see for themselves the similarities — and differences — between a famous historic portrait of Joseph Smith and the much-debated daguerreotype of Mormonism’s founder discovered in 2022.

They can scrutinize Smith’s handwriting in a letter to wife Emma penned on the last day of his life — June 27, 1844 — or examine a copy of characters (in what he said was “reformed Egyptian”) reportedly written on the plates that Smith said he unearthed in upstate New York from which sprang the Book of Mormon.

They are part of a collection of documents, artifacts and historic buildings — including the faith’s first temple in Kirtland, Ohio — that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently bought from the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) for $192 million.

Some of the relics are on display in a fresh museum exhibit, which opened to the public Monday, in the heart of Utah’s capital.

The Kirtland Temple itself reopened to public tours the same day — a mere 20 days after the Utah-based faith’s acquisition was announced.

“Our hope and expectation is that we would be as good a steward for these resources, these assets, these sacred locations, as [the Community of Christ has] been,” W. Christopher Waddell, first counselor in the LDS Church’s Presiding Bishopric, said in a news release. “Now it’s our turn to reciprocate and to be good stewards and good hosts for them and for [our] members.”

None of these items is new or unknown.

The 1842 oil portraits by David Rogers of the Smiths, for example, are familiar to Latter-day Saints. They have been reproduced in faith’s periodicals as well as examined and analyzed for more than a century.

For 182 years, though, the paintings of the first couple of Mormonism have been in possession of the Smith family, which stayed back in the Midwest after Brigham Young led his followers to Utah, and the Community of Christ.

Smith’s widow, Emma, purportedly did not like the Rogers portraits.

“I asked her if it were a good likeness of the prophet. She replied, ‘No, he could not have a good portrait — his countenance was changing all the time,’” wrote Junius Wells, a pioneer-era leader in the Utah church who interviewed the widow. “I then asked her what he thought of it and she replied: ‘I can tell you that, for I asked him and he said: ‘Emma, that is a nice painting of a silly boy, but it don’t look much like a prophet of the Lord.’”

That opinion was reiterated by Lachlan Mackay, a Community of Christ apostle and historian, in a 2022 interview.

Mackay is among those who studied the daguerreotype and believes it to be authentic and reflective of what Smith actually looked like.

Still, the paintings hung in Emma Smith’s home until she died, noted Laura Paulsen Howe, the museum’s art curator.

“They are really fine portraits,” Howe said Monday. “Nineteenth-century traveling portrait artists focused a lot on clothing rather than faces.”

She pointed out exquisite details in Joseph’s cravat and Emma’s collar.

The Salt Lake City exhibit also includes the door that once was the entrance to Missouri’s Liberty Jail, where Smith and several colleagues were incarcerated in 1838 for several months.

“As long as memory lasts,” wrote early Latter-day Saint Mercy Fielding Thompson, “will remain in my recollection the creaking hinges of that door, which closed upon the noblest men on earth.”

The exhibit showcases those large hinges.

By the late 1870s, the jail “was deemed structurally unsound and abandoned,” explained Riley Lorimer, the museum’s director. “In 1898, Joseph Smith III visited Liberty Jail along with other members of [the RLDS Church] and one of them … took the door home as a token of remembrance.”

It has been in the Community of Christ’s possession since, she said, and was “most recently on display in their museum in Independence, Missouri.”

Many of the other sale items are remaining in Kirtland and Nauvoo, Ill., Lorimer said, including two desks belonging to Joseph and Emma.

A window from the Kirtland Temple has been on long-term loan from the Community of Christ — in fact, has been a fixture of the museum’s visual storytelling for years.

With the sale, it is now permanent.

Though small, the exhibit might still be moving for Latter-day Saints who now can view Smith’s last letter before his assassination at Illinois’ Carthage Jail.

Its postscript (with original punctuation) reads: “I am very much resigned to my lot knowing I am justified and have done the best that could be done give my love to the children.”