Heber J. Grant (1856-1945) was the seventh President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the first president born in the state of Utah.

Heber J. Grant was born on November 22, 1856, in Salt Lake City, Utah, to parents Jedediah Morgan and Rachel Ridgeway Ivins Grant. Heber's father, Jedediah, died nine days after Heber was born, so his mother, Rachel, moved them to a widow's cabin several blocks away, which put the small family in one of the most culturally diverse LDS congragations in the territory.

Rachel found the means to send Heber to a good private school, but following frontier practice, he left school at age sixteen. However, he continued learning and stretching his knowledge throughout his life, including a literary group and reading of every kind.

Grant worked to peddle books, found local retailers for a Chicago grocery house, performed tasks for the Deseret National Bank, and taught penmanship, became the assistant cashier of Zion's Savings and Trust Company, sold insurance, and became owner of Ogden Vinegar Works.

At the unusually young age of fifteen, Heber was ordained to the office of seventy in the priesthood. When Heber was nineteen, his ward organized the first Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association, and Heber was called to serve as a counselor to its president. Just prior to his twenty-fourth birthday, Grant was called as a Stake President of the Tooele Stake, which he served for two years and ten months. At that time, in 1882, when he was only twenty-six years old, Grant was called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

Grant eventually married three wives, Hulda Augusta Winters, Emily Harris Wells, and Lucy Stringham. Each wife bore six children.

In 1916, Grant became the seventh President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

During his time as an Apostle and as President of the Church, Grant served two mission - Japan (1901-1903) and Europe (1903-1905), then served Church Education, the Genealogical Society, and the Church magazne, the Improvement Era. Church members grew familiar with the hardy, pioneer themes of President Grant's leadership. He repeatedly spoke of the need for charity, duty, honor, service, and work, and admonished the Saints to live modestly and to observe the prohibitions of the Church's health code, the Word of Wisdom. For Saints disoriented by the century's rapid social and cultural changes, President Grant's firm voice, ramrod-straight posture, and forceful-and sometimes sharp-tongued-delivery conveyed strength and resolution. He personified time-tested values.

in 1936 the Church under his leadership sought to assist impoverished Latter-day Saints by establishing the Church Security Program, later renamed the Church Welfare Program, one of the major accomplishments of his administration. To help get it established, President Grant gave the program his large dry farm in western Utah, in which he had invested more than $80,000.

During his time as president, he dedicated three new temples: Laie, Hawaii (1919), Cardston, Canada (1923), and Mesa, Arizona (1927). Several hundred chapels were constructed, many in areas outside the Utah heartland. The Washington, D.C., chapel, dedicated in 1933, symbolized Church growth nationally.

During President Grant's administration Church membership doubled. He traveled more than 400,000 miles, filled 1,500 appointments, gave 1,250 sermons, and made 28 major addresses to state, national, civic, and professional groups. His greatest achievements, however, cannot be measured statistically. During almost sixty-five years of Church service, he helped transform the Church from a sequestered, misunderstood, pioneer faith to an accepted, vibrant religion of twentieth-century America.

In 1940, while visiting Southern California, he suffered a series of strokes that slowed his pace and forced him to delegate active administration of the Church. President Grant died on May 14, 1945, at Salt Lake City, Utah.