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318 Utah Historical Quarterly halls, science halls, and later, young men's and young women's halls. On occasion a social hall was so large and well built that it would be used for ward meetings as well. Stylistically the early social halls looked just like meetinghouses. But as distinctive church form developed, the social hall took on a more secular character that it maintained until it began to be included within meetinghouses in the early 1920s. Tabernacles. The first tabernacle mentioned in the history of the Latter-day Saints was in Pottawattamie County, Iowa, where the Saints from Nauvoo stayed while awaiting an opportunity to journey west. Constructed of logs, it was known as the Log Tabernacle. This structure, built at the mouth of Miller's Hollow, or Kanesville (now Council Bluffs), was forty-by-sixty feet and was capable of seating about a thousand people. There, on December 27, 1847, the First Presidency of the church was reorganized with Brigham Young as president and Heber C. Kimball and Willard Richards as counselors. The first permanent religious structure in Salt Lake Valley was the Old Tabernacle. Constructed of adobe on a rock foundation, it stood on the southwest corner of the temple block. It measured 126 feet in length and 64 feet in width and had a sloping roof covered with wood shingles. Finished in 1852, it was capable of seating twenty-five hundred persons. There the famous Mormon Tabernacle Choir was organized, and meetings were held in the building regularly on Sundays. This tabernacle was torn down in 1877 when the erection of the Assembly Hall was commenced. While tabernacles had been built as early as the 1850s the greatest number and the most impressive buildings were not constructed until after 1877 when the church greatly expanded its number of stakes. Of the twenty extant tabernacles in Utah, only two were completed before 1877. Since 1877 many stakes of Zion have erected tabernacles with spacious assembly halls and often with rooms attached for offices of the stake presidency and for meetings of stake quorums. Other tabernacles were built to serve the needs of one or more wards in addition to the stake. These have been called stake centers, though the distinction between tabernacle and stake center is otherwise slight. In some cases tabernacles were built for wards alone, with stake conferences rotating between wards in the stake. In this instance the word "tabernacle" had more of a qualitative meaning. Any building that was especially large in scale and seating capacity and was spectacular in form and detailing might be called a tabernacle, even though stake meetings were seldom