Carthage Jail is the site of the June 27, 1844, attack in which Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith were killed. A compact, partly domestic building intended to hold prisoners became the setting for a breach that its guards did not prevent. Its physical layout shaped the assault, while the deaths inside and John Taylor’s survival gave the jail a lasting place in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Building and Confinement

The jail was a two-story structure in Carthage, Illinois, built with red limestone from a local quarry. Its walls were a yard thick, but its modest interior contained only six rooms: two locked cells and four rooms used as living quarters by the jailer, his wife, and their seven children. One of those living spaces was a cramped attic garret. The building combined detention with family life, a domestic arrangement that became consequential when the prisoners were moved out of the cells and into the jailer’s bedroom.

Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith had been charged with treason, as well as lesser offenses. Ten other Mormons in custody posted bail and were released, but the brothers remained imprisoned. At first they occupied the downstairs debtors’ cell, which was well lit and reasonably comfortable. The jailer, George Stigall, was not a Mormon, but he was described as decent and concerned that the cell’s large windows at ground level offered too little protection against the hostile crowd outside. He allowed the brothers to wait in his upstairs bedroom instead. That decision moved them from a cell into a more exposed part of the building, but it also permitted friendly visitors to see them without restriction.

The visitors’ access had a direct consequence: two firearms were smuggled into the bedroom, a six-shot pepperbox revolver and a single-shot pistol. In the final confrontation, those weapons gave Joseph and Hyrum a means of resisting the attack, but they could not prevent the mob from forcing its way into the room. The jail’s architecture thus offered no simple division between safety and danger: the cell seemed vulnerable because of its windows, while the bedroom’s door and window became the points around which the attack and attempted escape unfolded.

The Assault on June 27

Late in the afternoon of June 27, Joseph and Hyrum were in the bedroom with the Apostles John Taylor and Willard Richards. About 125 militiamen from Warsaw assembled outside. The men had earlier left Carthage in response to the governor’s orders, but returned at the end of the day with their faces disguised with gunpowder. Only seven members of the Carthage Greys were guarding the jail when the Warsaw Dragoons charged its entrance.

The guards fired muskets into the attacking force, but the weapons had been loaded with blanks as part of a prearranged plan. After the volley, the guards stepped aside. The attackers entered, firing indiscriminately; two shots came close to striking the jailer’s wife. They then surged upstairs and tried to force open the bedroom door. Joseph and Hyrum raised their smuggled weapons, while Taylor and Richards used walking sticks to strike at the gun barrels pushed through the partly opened door.

The attackers broke into the room. Hyrum was killed, and Joseph fired his revolver around the doorjamb before trying to escape through a window. He was shot and fell to the ground outside. A Carthage Greys officer who witnessed the fall reported that the attackers continued to shoot him and used a bayonet. The jail, with its thick stone walls, had not protected the prisoners from a breach that began at the entrance and moved rapidly through the building to the upstairs bedroom.

Survivors and the Remembered Hour

Richards survived behind the bedroom door, where he had been squeezed between the door and the wall as it swung open. He remained unnoticed until the shooting stopped. Once the attackers had left, he came out and looked through the window, seeing a crowd gathered around Joseph’s body below. He then found Taylor alive on the floor, badly wounded. The contrasting outcomes—Richards hidden, Taylor injured but surviving, and the two Smith brothers dead—belong to the same confined sequence of events within the jail.

Taylor’s watch had stopped at 5:16 and 26 seconds on June 27, 1844. The account presents that precise time and date as a memory kept by Mormons around the world, linking the building to a moment commemorated well beyond Carthage. Joseph Smith was thirty-eight. Taylor survived and later succeeded Brigham Young as the church’s third president and prophet in 1877. Nine years later, Taylor received a disputed revelation affirming plural marriage, a development the book connects to the modern fundamentalist movement, the settlement of Short Creek, and the later life of Dan Lafferty.

Historical Significance

Carthage Jail’s significance rests both in what occurred there and in the particulars of how the building was used. The jailer’s concern about the downstairs cell’s windows led him to relocate the prisoners; unrestricted visits made it possible to bring in weapons; and the guards’ blank ammunition and withdrawal opened the way for the attack. These details place the deaths not in an abstract setting of imprisonment, but in a specific building whose rooms, entrances, and windows shaped the course of the violence.

The site also marks a turning point whose consequences extended beyond the immediate attack. Taylor’s survival carried the event into the church’s later leadership, while his subsequent revelation became part of the history of plural marriage and fundamentalism described in the book. The remembered time on his stopped watch fixes the deaths to a precise hour. Carthage Jail therefore stands in the account as both the physical setting of Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith’s killing and a point from which later religious history proceeds.