Huntley invested over $2,000 in the property, which was badly in need of repair, hoping to establish a new organization of Saints at Kirtland Temple under the authority of early Mormon apostle John E.
[4][5] After the failure of this attempted Latter Day Saint church, Huntley sold his title to Kirtland Temple on 17 February 1873, for $150, to Joseph Smith III and Mark Hill Forscutt.
[1] Kim L. Loving, an attorney and former president of the Eastern Great Lakes Mission Center of the Community of Christ in Kirtland, Ohio, explained why the case was dismissed: "Suffice it to say that, legally, the Court dismissed the default case of the plaintiff, the Reorganized Church, because it failed to allege or prove one of the essential elements of a statutory cause of action to quiet title in Ohio, that the plaintiff was in possession of the property.
"[2] Though frequently misrepresented as the original product of Judge Sherman, the findings of fact in the case were written as a proposed judgment by E. L. Kelley, attorney for the RLDS Church.
[7] Though the court dismissed the case, the publication of the findings of fact filed by the attorney representing the RLDS Church in the Painesville Telegraph effectively gave the false impression that the Kirtland Temple Suit had been won.
The March 15, 1880, issue of the RLDS Church organ Saints' Herald also omitted the last two sentences which stated that the case was dismissed.
In 1942, E. Guy Hammond, an Akron, Ohio attorney, wrote to RLDS Church leader Israel A. Smith: "From your letter I get the impression that you still cling to the notion that Judge Sherman's decision in Common Pleas at Painesville might be relied on.
"[12] As late as 1986, historian Roger D. Launius, however, still upheld that "[i]t would be quibbling to suggest that the outcome of the Kirtland Temple Suit did not give the Reorganized church legal ownership of the property.
The only difficulty, at least from today's perspective, was that the Reorganization's polemical proclamations of judicially determined legitimacy actually had no legal basis whatsoever.