Look to your left and you will see a building that looks like a miniature Greek temple, built from rough-hewn local tufa stone with a wide concrete staircase leading up to a porch supported by six smooth columns. This is Saint John's Methodist Episcopal Church, built in 1917. The native tufa stone, a porous rock formed from ancient volcanic ash, anchors the building firmly in the harsh landscape.
The congregation itself is the oldest religious group in Kingman, dating back to the late nineteenth century when this area was just a rough-and-tumble mining camp. But as the roads and rails expanded, this dusty outpost transformed, linking the grit of the frontier with the wider, modern world. And with that connection came an unexpected dose of Hollywood glamour.
Picture this. It is March 1939. Clark Gable gets a surprise day off from filming Gone With the Wind. He calls his fellow movie star, Carole Lombard, and suggests they elope. To dodge the relentless Los Angeles press, they enlist a friend to provide a brand-new DeSoto car, slap on temporary cardboard license plates, and pack homemade sandwiches so they will not be recognized stopping at roadside diners.
After taking turns driving four hundred and fifty miles through the dark desert night, the exhausted but thrilled group rolled into Kingman. A thoroughly stunned local court clerk processed their marriage license and sent them right up these steps to Reverend Kenneth Engle.
The young pastor quickly pulled together a private ceremony. Gable wore a sharp blue suit with a patterned tie, and Lombard dressed in a dove-grey flannel suit. Reverend Engle was fiercely protective of their privacy, strictly refusing to let anyone photograph the wedding. As soon as the vows were spoken, the newlyweds hopped back in the car and drove another ten hours straight back to California, arriving just in time to face a massive press conference on their lawn.
Sadly, the love story cemented within these rugged stone walls ended in tragedy just three years later. Returning from a highly successful war bond rally in 1942, Lombard won a fateful coin toss to decide her travel plans, opting to fly rather than take a train. Her flight crashed into a mountain in Nevada, leaving no survivors. Gable was utterly devastated. Though he eventually remarried, he never truly recovered from the loss, and upon his death in 1960, he was interred right beside the woman he married in this quiet Kingman church.
Today, the building has found a new life. If you go inside now, you will not find a congregation, but rather the Mohave County Office of the Public Defender. It is a wonderful example of how Kingman adapts its historic spaces, letting modern attorneys walk the very same floors where Hollywood royalty once stood.
When you are ready, let us take a short three minute walk over to the Mohave County Courthouse and Jail, where we will see how this same local stone meets grand civic ambition.
