Tallahassee Florida Temple
On 5 April 2020, during the closing session of the 190th annual general conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, President Russell M. Nelson announced that a new temple would be built in Tallahassee Florida. The Tallahassee Florida Temple will be the third temple in the state of Florida for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The other two temples are the Orlando Florida Temple (1994) and the Ft. Lauderdale Florida Temple (2014). You can read the dedicatory prayer for the Orlando Florida Temple and the dedicatory prayer for the Ft. Lauderdale Florida Temple online.
The location announcement and exterior rendering release were made on Newsroom on Wednesday, 13 January 2021. The temple will be built on a 4.97-acre site located at 2440 Papillon Way in Tallahassee, Florida, the largest city in the Florida Panhandle and the state’s capital. It will stand across from an existing meetinghouse on Thomasville Road. It will stand on a major highway on the north side of Tallahassee, providing good access to members living throughout the region. The project will also include the construction of a distribution center. The rendering depicts a temple — still in the planning and design stages and with no groundbreaking date yet set — projected to be approximately 29,000 square feet, with a center spire.
Florida is home to more than 160,000 members in 33 stakes, 267 congregations and four missions. Tallahassee currently is in the Orlando temple district, with that temple some 260 miles away.
On the day of the announcement, Tallahassee native Shannon Havlicak Grondel recalled that the four-hour drive to the Orlando Florida Temple was a defining element of her childhood. she said, "While such a trek is minuscule in comparison to those of Saints around that world whose journey can only be made by boat, plane, or countless hours by train — it was nonetheless an obstacle to more regular temple attendance."
