Provo Polygamous Wives Bicycle Tour

This unique tour explores how the post-Manifesto period of LDS history—marked by the 1890 declaration by President Wilford Woodruff ending the Church's official practice of polygamy—continues to echo through Provo’s historic homes. Centered on the preserved dwellings of four devoted 19th-century polygamous wives (all from different families), this tour uses architecture as a lens to examine the personal and cultural disruptions brought by sweeping religious change.

Like their diaries, their dwellings offer rare insight into their lives. This tour includes an exterior visit to two historic shops and one home, as well as entry into the preserved Victorian home of one of A.O. Smoot’s wives on Center St. These structures are more than just buildings—they are testimonies to resilience, adaptation, and the hidden layers of Utah’s complex past.

Tour guide Paula Kelly Harline is a Preservation Utah Board Trustee and author of The Polygamous Wives Writing Club: From the Diaries of…