Liberty

At a college football game in Topeka, Kansas, most Washburn fans are prepared for the heat.

Donnie King from Liberty, Missouri is at the game to support her son, a redshirt freshman at Washburn.

She has an umbrella, water, and sunblock.

I brought all those knowing it was going to be 84 degrees, sitting in the sun.

who coached him in college from 04 to 06, but joining the Royals will allow him to be closer to his family.

Mentz is a native of Liberty, Missouri, and his wife, Nicolette, currently works as a dietician for the Kansas City Chiefs.

Mentz's departure leaves assistant Oscar Bernard as the Giants' lone hitting coach for now, though the club is already having discussions about how to backfill the position.

The Giants have also made some tweaks to their pitching infrastructure this offseason.

And I had a picture in my mind of something I wanted.

We went to a couple of like children's boutiques in Liberty, Missouri and Didn't find what I wanted.

The second one was like, oh, you got to go try this store Hampton James around the corner.

So we go over there and we're kind of looking at items and it's like a shop that does like personalized embroidery.

So I've been around a while.

In 1982, I visited here in in Independence, Missouri, and in Liberty and other counties where the Mormons settled.

I had already started collecting Justice Smith period books of Mormon and documents as early as about 1982, a teenager.

So I ended up moving here in 1988.

So probably getting a little ahead of myself, but let's talk about this.

This is a slide.

Let me just say, let me just tell everybody, do you want to pull up your slide now, Ron? Because what kind of burst out there onto social media just a couple of days ago is this documentary that John has put out, and we'll link it in the show notes, an appearance in front of the Liberty, Missouri City Council, and just this development that's happening that could have a very negative impact on something that, you know, is considered a historical site for Mormonism and has other historical ramifications.

So like I said, I mentioned on the newscast, talked a little bit about it, but now we're going to hear it from John himself, you know, exactly what is going on in that area there in Liberty, Missouri.

Is a data center being built on the land where Zelf, who Joseph Smith called the white Lamanite, is buried along with two of the eight Book of Mormon witnesses? We bring on Mormon historian John Hijack to talk about the 1834 Zion's Camp discovery on a mound in Illinois of the bones of a famous white Lamanite, of which Wilford Woodruff carries to Clay County, Missouri.

And by the way, this whole area of Independence and Clay County, Liberty, seems to be a hotbed for building data centers.

And a developer now is looking to put a fourth data center there, possibly covering these graves, including several black slaves, with a three-building 568,000 square foot development, perhaps right on top of them.

Now, John Hijack has been to the Liberty City Council to make his arguments as to why this land needs to be preserved.

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So John, it looks like they're going to be building a data center, a massive data center from the developer Metroblocks, right on the site of Zelf's bones.

Tell us about this.

As we remember with gratefulness our legacy, let us recall the faithful declarations of the past.

Near Liberty, Clay County, Missouri, Samuel Bent was the object of religious persecution.

As he was tied to a tree and whipped by a mob and saw his wife die from the effects of these privations, yet he nobly declared, "My faith is as ever, and I feel to praise God in prisons and in dungeons and in all circumstances, whatever I may be found." For Titus Billings, his escape from mobocracy in Missouri was plagued with starvation and frostbite.

For three days and nights, he ate only slippery elm bark for food.