Myth 5 | The White to Gold Angel
If you have ever read an article about Angel Statues or visited a site covering temple trivia, you are bound to have read something like this:
‘The White Angel was found to be too hard to see, so it was removed from Monticello and was later gold leafed and placed on Columbus Ohio.’
This statement is EVERYWHERE on the Internet.
It’s not true.
The Monticello Moroni was switched out on 25 May 1999. The Columbus Moroni was placed on 5 June 1999, only 11 days later. While it is possible that this was removed, Sent to Salt Lake, gilded, and shipped to Columbus in that short window, when you know more about the history of the small angel with a scroll, that proposition becomes unlikely at best.
In an Article titled “A Life Size Moroni,” written by Carla Byram and published in The Deseret News 23 May 1998, the author states that the first of these new life size, scroll holding statues had just been placed on the Monticello Utah Temple the previous week. Later in the article she states that “five more statues have been started at Wallgren’s Kearns studio.” The knowledge that there were 6 of these statues to begin with refutes the idea that there was any urgent need for this statue to be gilt and reused. Columbus was the third of these statues to be placed, the first having been Monticello. The second statue placed was the Anchorage Alaska temple, and it should be noted that that statue had already been gilded when it was placed.
And it was placed before the Monticello Statue was removed. Not including the Statue from Monticello, when it came time to place the statue at Columbus, there were 4 other statues of this style awaiting placement.
The statue at Bismarck, again already gilded, would be placed just 5 days after Columbus. It too, was already gilt. This placement would suggest that when the Columbus Statue was ready to be placed that there were at least 2 of these 5 remaining statues gilt and ready to go; One for Anchorage, one for Bismarck. The fact that each of these was placed on either side of Columbus would imply that the Columbus statue was already gilt and ready to go when the Monticello statue came down.
The last 2 of the statues placed would be placed 3 months and 9 months after that, and would be shipped overseas, first to Kona Hawaii, and the last to Caracas Venezuela.
At least 6 statues of this model were created for temples. But only 5 temples currently have this statue. Why rush to refinish one statue, when there are 5 others on standby ready to go, and the record of placement makes it clear that at least 2 of the remaining 5 had already been gilded?
In January of 2016, Marvin Quist (researcher who contributes heavily to this book) found a still white version of this statue lying on a shipping blanket on a pallet in the Church History Museum archives. For the previous decade and a half, the statue had sat in a rotting crate on the backlot of the Church History Museum, with no one aware it was event here. A tag around the arm of the Angel identifies it as the Monticello Utah Angel Moroni.
The weight of evidence makes it clear that this story is untrue, wherever it came from originally.