Only Nettie Tobin's Stone Arrived: The Cornerstone of Wilmette

On the morning of May 1, 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá travelled by train north from Chicago to the lakefront village of Wilmette, where the American Bahá’í community had purchased land for the first House of Worship in the West. A large tent had been pitched on the empty plot. Friends had gathered from across the country. Representatives of every continent and tradition the small American Bahá’í community could supply were present: delegates of the American assemblies; Mihtar Ardishír Bahrám Surúsh, of the Bahá’ís of Persian Zoroastrian background; Siyyid Asadu’lláh, of the Bahá’ís of Muslim origin; Zia Bagdadi, representing the Arabian friends; and Ghodsieh Khánum Ashraf, representing the Bahá’í women of the East.

Many stones had been gathered for the ceremony. Each had been sent in by a particular community to be set into the foundation. But Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání records, with the historian’s attention to detail, that on the day of the ceremony only one stone had actually arrived in Wilmette: the stone brought by Nettie Tobin.

Nettie was a widow and seamstress in Chicago. She had no money to contribute to the building. She had decided, instead, to contribute a stone. She found one in a builders’ rejection pile near her home; it had been judged unfit and discarded. With the help of a friend she had levered it into a baby carriage, wheeled it onto a streetcar, then enlisted neighbourhood boys with an express wagon for the last leg to Wilmette. There she had left it.

When the moment came for the ceremony, the Master asked for the stone Nettie had brought. He laid it Himself.

Mahmúd records the brief talk that accompanied the laying. The Master placed the day’s stone within the larger meaning of the House to be built upon it:

The outer edifice is a symbol of the inner.

The wood and stone of the future temple, He explained, would matter only insofar as they expressed the spiritual reality of the community that built it. He revealed that morning the prayer for America that would be carried in Bahá’í homes for generations afterwards — a prayer that the country might become glorious in spiritual degrees.

The cornerstone of the Mother Temple of the West remains, today, in a small contemplation room beneath the building. It is the stone Nettie Tobin found in a Chicago rejection pile and dragged across the city by streetcar.

Paraphrased from Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald, 1998), entry for May 1, 1912; see original for full text.

Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání, M.. (1998). *Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání*. George Ronald.