Conference record · 1853 April General Conference · 1853-04-06
Deseret News minutes of the April 6-10, 1853 General Conference, the occasion of the Salt Lake Temple cornerstone-laying ceremony. All four cornerstone orations and prayers are filed separately as full talks: the Southeast (Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball), Southwest (Edward Hunter, Alfred Cordon), Northwest (John Young, George B. Wallace), and Northeast (Parley P. Pratt, Orson Hyde). Corrected during heavyweight review; a prior pass of this note incorrectly claimed the Northwest and Northeast talks were not yet transcribed, when they already existed as separate files. The later-conference discourses by Orson Hyde ('Sanctification—Economy—Apostates,' JD 1:71-73), John Taylor ('Legitimacy and Illegitimacy,' JD 1:221-233), Parley P. Pratt ('Heirship and Priesthood,' JD 1:256-263), and Brigham Young ('Heirship,' JD 6:306-308; 'The Temple Cornerstones—The Apostleship, &c,' JD 1:131-137) from April 6-10 remain open work for a future ingestion pass.
Official published minutes of the conference.
Digital transcript of the Deseret News minutes, including the full cornerstone-laying ceremony account.
Proofread against the source text.
Proofread against the Deseret News/weebly witnesses; fixed stale not-yet-transcribed claims (see heavyweight_review_notes).
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass: this conference-record file claimed the Northwest and Northeast cornerstone talks (John Young, Wallace, Pratt, Hyde) were not yet transcribed, when all four already existed as separate talk files. Corrected the fidelity_notes and body narrative to reflect this. Also found and fixed a serious content-integrity bug in the John Young file itself (wrong discourse text entirely; see that file's heavyweight_review_notes for details). Did not re-verify the full sustaining-vote roster or day-by-day narrative for April 7-10 against the original Deseret News scan (newspapers.lib.utah.edu returns HTTP 418 to automated fetch, a known tooling limitation); those sections are unchanged from the prior pass.
This is a living critical edition. If you find a transcription, metadata, or sourcing error in this talk, report it to the editors →Reports are collated against the page scan and land as corrections in the vault.