By Kyle Thompson
kylet@newsroom.byu.edu
Orrin Porter Rockwell, one of Lehi's first settlers, lived an exciting and often controversial life.
This weekend the city of Lehi, Utah honors Rockwell, an important figure in the early history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Former Lehi resident Stanley Wanlass' bronze sculpture of Rockwell will be unveiled in front of the Lehi City Building on Saturday, Sept. 9, at 4 p.m.
Eventually, the statue will be moved from the city building to a permanent location a few blocks away.
'The place where the monument goes was where his home was in Lehi in the late 1850s and early 1860s,' said John Rockwell of the Lehi Historical Preservation Commission.
'I've always been interested in Porter Rockwell,' Wanlass said. 'Back when I was a graduate student at BYU I did a bust of Porter Rockwell in stone.'
According to Wanlass, that bust won a Brockbank award and is in the university's private collection.
Lehi's current project to commemorate Rockwell has been underway for nearly three years. Wanlass spent the better part of two years actually creating the monument.
Roughly a quarter of the work that Wanlass did for the statue was research on his subject.
He said that while he has a mostly positive feeling for Rockwell, many other people do not.
'Rockwell was such a controversial person. To some people he was almost an angel, and to others he was a devil. Everything that I did had to be pretty subjective,' Wanlass said.
According to Richard Lloyd Dewey's 'Porter Rockwell; a Biography,' Rockwell was accused of the attempted assassination of Missouri Gov. Lilburn W. Boggs in 1842.
For this, as well as his heavy-handed method of law enforcement on the frontier, Rockwell earned notoriety as 'The Destroying Angel.'
On the other hand, as Wanlass points out, Rockwell played a significant, positive role in early local and church history.
He was a personal friend of Joseph Smith, bodyguard to Brigham Young, and a guide to wagon trains of pioneers.
The statue is also highly symbolic. For example, a glove symbolically separates Rockwell, the man, from the gun that he holds, Wanlass said.
Not only was Rockwell one of the Lehi area's first settlers, he was one of its first businessmen. He maintained a hotel and rest stop for travelers at the Point of the Mountain for several years.
Many of his descendants still live in the area.
The Lehi City Building is at 153 North 100 E. in Lehi.