Interactive Plat of the City of Zion

The plat sent to Missouri on 25 June 1833, reconstructed to scale from the manuscript’s own stated measurements. Hover or tap any lot, village, or numbered building; use the reveal button for a guided tour of the plan.

Streets, 132 ft wide Residential lots The three painted blocks

Hover or tap a lot, village, storehouse, or numbered building above to read what the manuscript says about it.

What the Plat Specifies

The plat lays out a square mile — 6,336 feet on a side by its own units — of forty-nine ten-acre blocks, set eight perches (132 feet) apart by streets on every side. Forty-two of those blocks are ordinary residential blocks of twenty half-acre lots each, ten facing each of two sides across a middle line. The four blocks flanking the painted squares are larger: forty by sixty perches rather than forty by forty, the extra twenty perches carrying a third village of ten lots at the foot of the block, for thirty lots in all. At the center sit three blocks reserved from residential use entirely: a bishop’s storehouse, and two blocks of twelve numbered buildings each — twenty-four in total — individually named on the back of the plat.

Read the plat’s own explanation

“This plot contains one mile square, all the squares in the plot contain ten acres each, being 40 rods square. You will observe that the lots are laid off alternate in the squares: in one square running from the south and north to the line through the middle of the square, and the next the lots run from the east and west to the middle line. Each lot is 4 perches in front and 20 back, making 1/2 of an acre in each, so that no one street will be built on entirely through the street, but on one square the houses stand on one street and on the next one another, except the middle range of squares, which runs north and south, in which range are the painted squares; the lots are laid off in these squares north and south, all of them, because these squares are 40 perches by 60, being twenty perches longer than the others, the long way of them being east and west … the painted squares in the middle are for public buildings, the one without any figure is for store houses, for the Bishop, and to be devoted to his use.”

“The circles [rectangles in this view] inside of the squares are the places for the temples … the whole plot is supposed to contain from 15 to 20 thousand people … No one lot in this city is to contain more than one house, that to be built 25 feet back from the street, leaving a small yard in the front, to be planted in a grove, according to the taste of the builder; the rest of the lot for gardens, etc. All the houses to be built of brick and stone.”

Manuscript: Plat of the City of Zion, circa Early June–25 June 1833, hand of Frederick G. Williams — paraphrased and lightly modernized here for readability; source spelling and punctuation are irregular in the original.

The Twenty-Four Buildings, by Name

Frederick G. Williams copied the finished names into Minute Book 1 on 24 June 1833, the day before the plat itself was mailed to Missouri. This page follows that copy’s ordering: the names as they appear directly on the plat manuscript are interleaved with the marginal insertions Williams made while composing the explanation, and the Minute Book 1 copy is the plainest record of where the presidency settled once that work was done. Hover or tap any numbered lot above, or the rows below, to see how they correspond.

Nos.	Name
1, 2, 3	House of the Lord for the Elders of Zion — “an ensign to the nations.”
4, 5, 6	The Holy Evangelical House for the High Priesthood — “Of the holy order of God.” Building #5 is marked with an X on the manuscript — the first of the twenty-four to be built.
7, 8, 9	The Sacred Apostolic Repository — For the use of the Bishops.
10, 11, 12	House of the Lord for the Presidency — After the order of Melchizedek, which was after the order of the Son of God, upon Mount Zion, City of the New Jerusalem.
13, 14, 15	House of the Lord for the Deacons in Zion — “Helps in government.”
16, 17, 18	House of the Lord for the Teachers in Zion — “Messenger to the church.” Building #17 is marked with an X on the manuscript — the first to be built in this block.
19, 20, 21	House of the Lord for the Priesthood after the order of Aaron — “The law of the kingdom of heaven, messenger to the people.”
22, 23, 24	House of the Lord for the Presidency, after the order of Aaron — “A standard for the people.”

This site distinguishes the plat’s own text from later analysis. The plat’s own stated population estimate (“15 to 20 thousand”) and its twenty-four named buildings are the primary record for 1833. The village and lot geometry reconstructed here follows the manuscript’s own stated units (4-perch lots, 20-perch depth, 40-by-60-perch blocks in the painted range) rather than a modern reinterpretation of them.

Primary sources: Joseph Smith Papers, “Plat of the City of Zion, circa Early June–25 June 1833”; Minute Book 1, p. 22 (“Names of the Temples of Zion,” 24 June 1833). This page reconstructs the plat’s geometry from its own stated measurements and paraphrases its explanatory text; see the Source Index for links to the originals.