"Nauvoo, the Beautiful Place"

“Nauvoo, the Beautiful Place” has been published in the current issue of Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley. This essay is about a town in western Illinois with a remarkable past: it was the site of two, mid-19^th-century utopias, one Mormon, one Icarian, as well as the oldest vineyards and wineries in the state. In recent years, many of the locals who have long loved Nauvoo, myself included, have had to grieve the loss of buildings, landscape, and access resulting from the surge of development by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the related influx of Mormon tourists and the Mormon retirees who are buying or building homes there.