One of the most popular representations of Mormonism at early twentieth-century worlds fairs was a miniature replica of the Salt Lake Tabernacle. Although vastly smaller than the original, the model was still substantial, four feet tall with an eight-by-five-foot base. Although it was sponsored by the Church, it was commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution as the centerpiece of a display on Mormon settlement in Utah, part of a larger exhibition on Western colonization for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle. Check out the University of Washington Library’s excellent digital resources on the Exposition, including an image of the Mormon display).
The church’s display in the exposition featured a number of artworks, artifacts, and a replica of the Salt Lake Temple on a similar scale, but the model Tabernacle was the undisputed crowd favorite. Visitors were drawn to the cutaway view, which not only represented the interior furnishings in exquisite detail—including a miniature Tabernacle organ—but also revealed the remarkable engineering in the building’s unique dome.
All this detail was possible because the artisan who built the model had also worked on the original. Abraham Reister Wright Jr. came to Utah as a young convert and worked in the Church Architect’s Office under Henry Grow on the building’s design. He was twenty-five when the Tabernacle was dedicated in 1867, and sixty-six when the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition opened.
The miniature Tabernacle was so popular that the church borrowed it back from the Smithsonian for the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933. For the Golden Gate Exposition, they upped the ante with a much-less miniature Tabernacle—this one could seat fifty visitors and featured a working pipe organ.
Now for the mystery—two mysteries, actually. First, while Wright constructed the miniature Tabernacle, the model of the Tabernacle organ was created by “Sotaro Masuda,” who the Inter-mountain Republican described as “an expert wood carver who arrived in Salt Lake recently from Kobe, Japan.” I have been able to find nothing at all about Masuda. There’s a Sataro Masuda listed as a resident of Brigham City in the 1910s, and a Santaro Masuda who died in Salt Lake in 1910 at age 28, but that’s about as much as I’ve uncovered. I would love to know more about the Japanese woodcarver from Kobe—definitely not the typical early-twentieth century Mormon artist.
An even more glaring mystery: what happened to the mini Tabernacle? The last I have found it mentioned in the press is in conjunction with the 1933 exposition in Chicago. News accounts claimed that the Church borrowed it from the Smithsonian—but it’s not listed in the current collections of any of the Smithsonian museums. Surely it’s still out there somewhere, I hope? I would love to hear from you if you’ve seen it or know what happened to it!