John Rowe Moyle: the stonecutter and the wooden leg

A community aboard ship

Moyle sailed from Liverpool aboard the Samuel Curling on April 19, 1856. His journal remembers the Saints gathering on deck the following day to hear Dan Jones and records his appreciation for the instruction. The passengers were organized into wards.

People were sustaining a worshipping community while they traveled toward an unfamiliar home. The ship carried their luggage, but it also carried the habits of faith and fellowship they were taking with them.

Before the plains: across the Atlantic

The crossing was far from a steady passage over quiet water. In an early-May storm, water reached the sleeping places and left beds wet for several days. During another rough stretch, the vessel rolled and luggage was thrown about.

Moyle’s account records the discomfort alongside gratitude for his family’s preservation. Boston came into view in May, and they landed on May 23.

From Boston toward Iowa

On May 26, the travelers continued from Boston by rail, reaching Iowa on June 2. After about a week in camp, the Moyle family began the next stage of its journey with the handcarts.

A skill offered to a shared undertaking

The Moyles made their Utah home in Alpine, where farm work and family life continued alongside John’s work as a stonecutter. His stone house still stands at the historic property. The surviving home helps us picture the two settings of his service: a household that needed daily care and a temple that needed the practiced work of his hands. The Ensign Peak Foundation’s site history describes him leaving the family’s horse for work on the farm while he made his way to Salt Lake City.

The work at home and the work on the temple were part of one family’s life. Keeping a horse on the farm made a difference to the people there. At the building site, Moyle offered the skill of a man accustomed to shaping stubborn material patiently, a little at a time.

The distance between home and the work

Later accounts remember a Monday departure before daylight, a working week in Salt Lake City, and a Friday walk home. The Ensign Peak Foundation’s history says that he lodged with a son during the working week. Home and workplace belonged to the same life, even though they were separated by a long journey. The walk joined them: outward toward the building site, then back toward the household in Alpine.

That rhythm gave his service a place in ordinary life: a road out, a week of work, and a road home. The miles connected the temple with the household that shared the cost of his time away. Behind the finished stone was a family living through those working weeks.

The injury his family remembered

In the later family account retold by Jeffrey R. Holland, a cow bolted during milking and kicked Moyle below the knee, shattering the bone. Family and friends used a door as an operating table, and the injured leg was amputated.

The story pauses here with a man in need of care. The hands that had worked stone could not put the broken leg right. Family and friends had a place in his survival, and their help deserves to remain beside the better-known story of his determination.

Making a way to walk again

As the wound healed, Moyle began shaping a wooden leg. The replacement included a joint for the ankle and foot. Walking hurt. He practiced inside the house, then in the yard, and eventually farther around his property, extending what he could manage a little at a time.

The Ensign Peak Foundation’s site history reports that Moyle’s wooden leg is displayed at the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum in Salt Lake City. In the picture, the task has become close and personal: a craftsman shaping something he will depend on with every step.

Remembering the worker beyond the obstacle

In the family account, Moyle gradually regained enough strength to resume the journey to temple work. Returning meant putting his practiced hands to use again.

He returned with the knowledge and skill he had spent a lifetime learning. The injury had changed how he moved, but he still had work to offer. Remembering him at the stone brings the familiar account back to a person: a craftsman finding his way into useful work again, with the cost of recovery behind each step.

Holiness to the Lord

The temple’s inscription gives this story a place to rest: “Holiness to the Lord.” An official 2025 restoration report credits John Rowe Moyle with the carving and describes renewed gilding of the east-center-tower panel. His life ended on February 15, 1889, before the temple’s 1893 dedication. The inscription remained, part of a building whose completion he did not live to see.

Those words turn our attention from the achievement of a builder to the One the house was built to honor. Moyle did not live to attend its dedication. People who came afterward would look up and read the inscription, often without knowing the name or the story of the man remembered for carving it.