Brigham & Mary Ann Young Historic Home
Original 1843 main house restored and both wings rebuilt with custom brick in Nauvoo, IL.
Perfectly imperfect, on purpose
Overview
Brigham and Mary Ann Young moved into this two-story brick home in Nauvoo, Illinois, on May 31, 1843, and a one-story wing was added on each side by 1844. They lived here until February 1846, when they left Nauvoo to begin the journey west. Today it's one of the homes visitors come to Historic Nauvoo to see. In 2025 and 2026 we had the privilege of restoring it, working under Westland Construction for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with the Church's historic sites team overseeing the preservation work.
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Two Wings That Had Failed
The main house still carries most of its original 1840s brick. The wings were a different story. They were rebuilt in the 1960s, and the rebar installed in that rebuild had corroded and caused damage. Over the decades both wings developed structural problems. The job was to restore the original main house, then take both wings down and rebuild them so they read like the rest of the house.
Nothing About the Original Is Uniform
Handmade 1840s brick varies in color, height and width, and no stock brick came close. The original coursing and joints are irregular too. Rebuilding two wings to sit beside original walls meant matching something that was never uniform to begin with, and doing it in a way you can't pick out from the street.
It Started With Planning, Not Demolition
We were brought in during budgeting in 2024, well before the work started, to help the team set realistic scope and cost and decide how the owner, general contractor, architect and masonry contractor would work together. Before we touched the walls, we built mockups. We also ran cleaning test panels on each elevation to see how much soiling we were actually dealing with and to find the gentlest cleaning that would work: a biological cleaner, no acids, no abrasives. That order matters. You match new brick and mortar to the cleaned wall, not the dirty one.
Custom Brick, Custom Mortar
After months of sampling, we had custom handmade brick made by Old Carolina Brick Company in two blends, mixed by percentage and adjusted by elevation, because the original reads differently on each face of the house. The custom brick carried nearly all of the color on its own. Selective staining touched fewer than ten bricks on the whole house.
U.S. Heritage Group developed custom repair mortars to match the original. A mortar match takes more than the right recipe. Sand gradation and binder color get you close, and the way the joint is tooled finishes it. We matched all three.
Main House First, Out in the Open
Blending repairs into an original wall means stepping back to read it, so all of the tuckpointing and masonry repair on the main house came first, before the custom brick arrived and before the house went under cover. Sound historic brick removed during the work was cleaned and saved. Matching brick for Nauvoo's 1840s buildings is scarce, and every salvaged unit helps the next restoration stay authentic.
A Building Around the Building
Designed Equipment Corporation built a steel-paneled scaffold enclosure around the entire house so the brick rebuild and the roof replacement could continue all winter, and the home would be ready for Nauvoo's next summer tourist season. With the structure heated and dry, the roof and both wings could come off without exposing original interior finishes to the weather. The roofing and framing trades kept working alongside us, and winter never shut the job down.
Perfectly Imperfect
Masons are trained to build plumb, level and true. This job asked for the opposite. The original coursing and joints are irregular, so our bricklayers had to build that variation in on purpose, working from reference photos of the original walls and stepping back to check how each course read. The Church's historic sites manager put it best: "We need you to make it perfectly imperfect." It became the phrase we used every day.
The walls are also stronger than they look. Historic multi-wythe walls were tied together with header courses. We kept that traditional look, and stainless steel spiral ties, set as the corners went up, carry the structural connection between wythes. We also used PROSOCO cleaning and anchoring products on the job.
Lime Plaster Inside
Our masonry and the interior finishes met at the same walls. Prestige Coatings & Color, also working under Westland, installed traditional lime mortar and lime plaster finishes over the masonry we restored and rebuilt, along with traditional wood lath on the ceilings. The order of that work matters on any historic building with plaster walls: the masonry has to keep the water out before the plaster goes back on. We explain why in Water-Damaged Church Plaster? Fix the Outside First.
Project Results
The Church rededicated the Brigham and Mary Ann Young Home on June 27, 2026, and it reopened to visitors on June 29. Stand on Kimball Street today and you'd be hard pressed to pick the new brick from the old. That was the whole point.
Plan a Visit
Historic Nauvoo is free, and the Young Home is open for guided tours. If you've never been, go. It's a big part of the history of the Latter-day Saints and of America's move west. Brigham Young went on to lead 60,000 to 70,000 pioneers across the plains and founded 350 to 400 settlements across the West.
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Our skilled team is here to bring your building to life. Contact us today to discuss your project!