Brigham Young is said to have identified the site for the temple within four days of arriving in the valley, walking the ground before most of the company had finished making camp. Ground was not broken until 1853, and what followed was forty years of construction: granite quarried in Little Cottonwood Canyon, some twenty miles distant, hauled first by ox team and later by a purpose built railway spur, cut and fitted by masons working through Utah winters.
Work was interrupted in 1857, when news of an approaching federal army reached the valley and the foundations, already laid, were deliberately buried to keep them from view until the crisis passed. The temple was finally dedicated in 1893, four decades after the groundbreaking. The Tabernacle, completed more quickly in 1867, carries its own feat of engineering in an elliptical lattice roof built largely without nails, which were scarce and costly in the territory at the time.
The square has kept changing since. Its perimeter wall, built early in the settlement's history, survives in part today, and the whole complex underwent a major seismic renovation announced in 2019, still under way, which has included underpinning the temple itself with a base isolation system and rebuilding much of the surrounding landscaping from the ground up.