by Sam Orme:
Listening to General Conference a few weeks ago (which was fantastic, and available in full online, and you should go back and read or re-read it all) got me thinking about the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The most recent addition to the quorum was Neal L. Andersen, who replaced Joseph B. Wirthlin upon his death. That made me stop and wonder: who did Elder Wirthlin replace? I did a little digging and found that he replaced Spencer W. Kimball.
I started to imagine the quorum as a table surrounded by fifteen chairs (twelve members of the quorum plus the three members of the First Presidency, who are also Apostles). When one member of the quorum leaves, his chair is moved to the back of the line of seniority, and someone takes his place. It's the same chair, though, in this scenario. You could imagine that Elder Andersen moved into Elder Wirthlin's office after it was vacated. So what if each man who sat in that chair, or worked out of that office, carved his name in it? What would those lists look like of who sat in each chair over the years?
It's a little trickier than you'd think, as it turns out. The quorum began with twelve members, but the practice of replacing members was much more fluid in the early days of the Church, and the practice of having three members of the quorum (again, for a total of fifteen) serve in the First Presidency didn't really gain steam until the early 1900s, so getting an exact sense of who is taking which seat and which seats are empty for the first sixty years or so was challenging. But that's no reason to back down, right?
We start with the original twelve members of the quorum, in order of seniority. Let's number each of their chairs around the table (or offices at Church HQ, if you'd prefer):
1. Thomas B. Marsh
2. David W. Patten
3. Brigham Young
4. Heber C. Kimball
5. Orson Hyde
6. William E. McLellin
7. Parley P. Pratt
8. Luke S. Johnson
9. William Smith
10. Orson Pratt
11. John F. Boynton
12. Lyman E. Johnson
Those are the twelve chairs we'll be carving names into. (The remaining three chairs come up a few years later, shortly after the death of Joseph Smith.) (You'll notice Joseph Smith's name doesn't appear on any of these chairs; he was never properly a member of the Quorum of the Twelve.) I'll spare you the chronology of men moving in and out of these seats, but just list below each seat's history. To me, at least, it's really interesting to see which seats had many occupants and which had few, as well as the relative prominence of each seat's occupants. Take a look:
Seat 1
Thomas B. Marsh
Lyman Wight
Charles C. Rich
John W. Taylor
Orson F. Whitney
Charles A. Calliss
Delbert L. Stapley
James E. Faust
Quentin L. Cook
Seat 2
David W. Patten
Willard Richards
Jedediah M. Grant
Daniel H. Wells
John Henry Smith
James E. Talmadge
Alonzo A. Hinckley
Sylvester Q. Cannon
Ezra Taft Benson
Jeffrey R. Holland
