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UnHed State. Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section number _8_ _ Page_6_ _ family. The structures were designed to accomodate Young's polygamous Mormon family to integrate his private and c~ficial affairs in a single organic household. As such, the complex served as a model for reshaping of the LDS household within the larger Mormon "City of Zion," in accordance with the doctrine of polygamy. The complex combines both older vernacular forms such as the center-passage, double-pile B~ehive House and an essentially new design such as the expansive Lion House. Joseph Smith probably practiced plural marriage beginning in 1841 and issued his "revelation" in 1843 that the doctrine was ordained to him by God. Not until 1852, however, at a special Church conference in Great Salt Lake City after the Mormons were solidly entrenched in their permanent and, they thought, safely isolated location, was the doctrine officially announced. Geographic isolation and the acceptance of religious and cultural pluralism on the frontier meant that this form of family structure had over a decade of incubation and development before it came under full attack during the Grant administration after 1869. The 1862 Anti-Bigamy Act that brought Connor and his troops to Utah provided penalties against plural marriage and levied sanctions against the economic power of the Mormon Church. It could not be implemented, however, and was thought to be unconstitutional. Thereafter, a succession of bills sought to bring the Utah Territorial court system under the authority of the Federal Government, to prohibit Church solemnization of marriages, to deprive wives of immuni£~ as witnesses in cases involving their husbands, and to punish cohabitation. The Mormons resisted legal prosecution and endured social discrimination because they believed polygamy had Biblical precedent and divine sanction. Like other millenarian groups who sought literally to "reform" what many in Jacksonian and pre-Civil War America saw as a disintegrating social and moral order, the Latter-day Saints attempted to create a new model of earthly existence. Lawrence Foster, historian of the innovative Oneida, Shaker, and Mormon forms of family and community life, identifies certain common characteristics of these groups. All three depended on "a similar type of personal, charismatic leadership" who interpreted their experiences as having "cosmic importance." The followers in each group had an Anglo-American ethnic base. Most, like the Mormons, migrated westward from New England or western New York, a region "experiencing rapid economic growth and unstable social conditions" in the 1830s and 1840s. All three of the groups studied by Foster were founded on a restructuring of family and marital life. "They all were convinced," according to Foster, "that the old order was radically diseased and corrupt, tottering inevitably toward destruction--'the end of the world,' in their terms. Rejecting the wicked world, these groups instead set up their own religious communities, based on