Myth 10 | World’s Fair Moroni used on [Seattle] Temple

Myth 10 | World’s Fair Moroni used on [Seattle] Temple

Back in the late 1950’s sculptor Elbert Porter was commissioned to carve a statue for use on the Mormon Pavilion at the World’s Fair in New York. The façade of the pavilion was a replica of the temple in Salt Lake City, so the Statue sculpted by Elbert Porter was a replica of the Cyrus Dallin Statue, 8’ 3” high.

After the New York World’s fair this statue was shipped around the world and used at other World’s Fairs. Popular tradition holds that after the Osaka World’s Fair the statue was retired from traveling and placed on the Seattle temple, though other tellings of the story will put it at other temples.

There are lots of problems with this tradition.

With the tradition of it being placed at Seattle, the Seattle statue is 15 feet tall and holding gold plates. The Elbert Porter statue is almost half the height, and as it is a replica of the Dallin Statue, is not holding plates.

Currently, there are only three statues in use that look like the Dallin Statue, one of which is the Dallin Statue itself. This means that there are only two temples in the whole world that could have the Porter statue. One is the Idaho Falls Idaho Temple, and one is the Boston Massachusetts Temple. The confirmed height of both of those statues 11’ 6”. This means that both of the statues are the Torlief Knaphus replica of the Dallin Statue.

As all other statues on all other temples are not replicas of the Dallin Statue, it can safely be concluded that the Porter statue is not actually in use on any temple. Additionally, in response to a request for information from the Church History Library, they were also able to confirm that the statue did not end up on any temple. The Current whereabouts of this statue re unknown, but staff at the CHL^[1]Unable to find any information as to where this statue ended up, I put an inquiry to the staff at the Church History Library. The response was as follows: “To the best of my knowledge the statue no longer exists. It is not on any temple and it is not part of the museum collection. I have also never seen it at the Wilford Wood museum. It was not built to be permanent. It was likely so fragile after the worlds [sic] fairs that it was discarded. I hope that helps.” is believed that the statue was not quite as resilient as modern fiberglass statues, and as such was destroyed when it no longer became useable. This myth is untrue.

In early of 2019 I received an email from an associate in which it was discussed that the Church’s Motion Picture studio had at one time, two replicas of Dallin’s Angel Moroni, a taller and a shorter version. Research uncovered that the larger of the two statues had been loaned out to a stake, who then loaned it out to another stake without having permission to do so, and so on until it became lost to the Studio, presumably for good. The shorter statue remains in the possession of the Studio, and is the right height to be the Elbert Porter World’s fair statue.^[2]Email conversation between myself and Gerald Orr, Producer for the Church, in which he made further inquiries to other members of the studio production team. In an email from a descendant of Elbert Porter it was confirmed that  the statue was indeed given to the Studio after it was no longer needed for the World’s Fairs.

---