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Show Page 158 CHAPTER VII THE MILLENNIAL STAR Zion had now to be measured and described. With another surveyor, Henry G. Sherwood, Orson started out Monday morning, August 2, to lay out the city of the Great Salt Lake with a chain and a couple of trimmed poles from the canyon. Starting from the natural point of reference, the corner of the proposed temple block,he checkered the city into blocks ten acres square. Though the new town was to be spacious and well-ordered, as Joseph Smith would have wanted it, it would have to be compact and defensible as well; though planned as a world capital on New England grids, it was still a post in the wilderness. The Saints decided to trust in God rather than mud walls, however, when Orson pointed out the months it would take to fence in a city over two thousand rods in perimeter. From the southeast corner of the temple block, Orson and Sherwood directed their chain along a line stretching into infinity, over mountains and lakes and deserts to the north and to the east - this Was to be the fixed center of Zion, the point from which the Great Basin would be set out in a vast square graph of section and township, and, spiritually, the whole earth be diagramed. The Great Salt Lake Base and Meridian, still marked by a little stone shaft at the intersection of South Temple and Main 8treets, remains one of only four such baselines still in use in the United States, testifying to the accuracy of Orson's observations. He plotted this point at 4,309 feet above sea level at six seconds below the |