Institute celebrates its 100th anniversary on the date and at the place where it all began

26, 1926, Church President Heber J. Wyley Sessions, a newly returned mission president in South Africa, to Moscow, Idaho — a small town on the border of Washington state on the Idaho Panhandle — to start “collegiate seminaries. ” During the 75th anniversary commemoration in 2001 of that historic assignment — the seedbed for what would become The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Institutes of Religion program — President Henry B. Eyring, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the Church commissioner of education, noted there was no building. There was no curriculum.