The Plat of the City of Zion, 1833
The Plat of the City of Zion is a single surveyed drawing, with its written explanation, dated June 1833. Read in its own unit of measure, the perch of 16½ feet, every one of its dimensions closes: a true square of 6,336 feet on each side, 49 blocks, 960 lots of exactly half an acre, and twenty-four public buildings seated on their blocks to the inch. It is the one drawing from which every NewVistas community is laid out.
What the plat is
The plat and its explanation were recorded in the hand of Frederick G. Williams between early June and 25 June 1833, and sent from Kirtland, Ohio, to Independence, Missouri. The sheet states its own scale — “The Scale of the plot is 40 perches to the inch” — which makes it a measured survey, not a sketch. The manuscript is preserved and imaged in The Joseph Smith Papers.
NewVistas reads the plat for what it specifies: measures, counts, offices and the order in which a community is built. Devotional language is not treated as authority, and no claim is made about the source or status of the document. Authority rests on whether the numbers close and whether the community they describe can be built and run. Method and Sources sets out how every page on this site is translated from the original wording.
The measure that makes it close
The explanation says the plot “containes one mile square.” Measured against the statute mile of 320 rods, its stated blocks and streets give neither a mile nor a square: 344 rods north to south and 364 east to west. Read in the plat’s own measure, the side is 384 perches — the old English long mile of 6,336 feet, or 1.2 statute miles — and both axes close exactly.
| Axis | Blocks | Streets | Boundary strip | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| North–south | 7 × 40 = 280 perches | 8 × 8 = 64 | 2 × 20 = 40 | 384 perches |
| East–west | 6 × 40 + 60 = 300 perches | 8 × 8 = 64 | 2 × 10 = 20 | 384 perches |
Everything on the land is laid out in that perch: a lot is 4 perches wide (66 feet), a street 8 (132 feet), a block 40 (660 feet), and the central range 60 (990 feet).
Blocks, streets and lots
The square holds 49 blocks between streets all eight perches wide. Forty-two are ordinary ten-acre blocks, 40 perches square. The middle row is deeper: seven blocks of 40 by 60 perches, fifteen acres each. Every lot is 4 perches by 20 — 66 by 330 feet, half an acre — and lots alternate direction from block to block, so that no street is built along its whole length.
| Block type | Size | Count | Lots each | Lots |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ordinary | 40 × 40 perches, 10 acres | 42 | 20 | 840 |
| Central range, residential | 40 × 60 perches, 15 acres | 4 | 30 | 120 |
| Central range, public | 40 × 60 perches, 15 acres | 3 | — | — |
| Total | 49 | 960 |
The three central blocks
Three blocks at the centre of the middle range carry no lots. Two each seat twelve public buildings, twenty-four in all, set eight perches back from the street on every side. The block between them is drawn “without any figure” — open ground, which NewVistas builds as the community’s warehouses. The fifteen-acre depth is not arbitrary: twelve buildings of the size the plat specifies do not fit on a ten-acre block, and they fit a fifteen-acre block exactly.
Farmland, and the next square
Barns and stables stand outside the square, so that none sit among the houses. Farms are laid off to the north and south — and east and west if needed — with land enough to supply the whole plot. When one square is laid off and supplied, the explanation directs the next: “lay off another in the same way.” Growth is by replication of the whole pattern, never by enlarging one city.
How NewVistas builds the plat
Built with present-day technology, the plat becomes a high-density, self-contained community of 92,160 people. Each of the 960 lots carries one building, as the plat requires; the twenty-four public buildings seat a governing corps of 1,920 unpaid, part-time presidents; and every building runs its own power, water and waste systems. People move on breezeways rather than streets of traffic, and the farmland of the explanation becomes the ten-mile square each community starts on.
- System Overview — the whole community in one page
- Presidencies and Councils — how the 1,920 offices are organized
- The Plat to Scale — the drawing redrawn block by block
- Glossary — the plat’s terms and their modern equivalents