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NORTH SALT LAKE -- Mary Wood Cannon slowly makes her way past a 20-foot-long python hide and pushes replicas of the death masks of Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum across a table.

The table used to be the front door to the old Salt Lake City post office. On top of it sits a yellowed copy of The Book of Mormon and a belt buckle once worn by Joseph Smith, the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

A stuffed buffalo head stares from a nearby wall while Cannon runs a finger over a bullwhip handle Smith once held; she encourages her visitor to do the same.

Cannon proudly points out that the Wilford Wood Museum is no ordinary repository of Mormon and Old West artifacts. The treasured relics her father gathered over the decades weren't meant to be admired from a distance.

Instead, they rest on dusty tables or worn shelves for anyone to pick up. The only restriction is that all visitors have to make an appointment with Cannon to get near them.

The museum is housed in a long, musty wood-and-brick shed where Wilford Wood -- Cannon's father -- once stored coats made from the pelts of animals he trapped. Surrounded by clumps of dried grass, discarded tires and a pitted, disabled dump truck, the 60-year-old museum squats amid new, expensive suburban homes.

Its neighbors regard it as they might a cranky but good-hearted elder relative -- someone to be avoided at family reunions yet mourned upon death.

``It's sort of an eyesore but it's also a landmark,'' said Cindy Powers, who can look over the museum's debris from the front door of her gleaming tri-level house.

``A lot of people have said to us, `Doesn't that bother you?' '' said Laurie Markisich, as she points across the street to the museum. ``It has never bothered us. Besides, we have fun watching the deer that walk through the bushes over there.''

Cannon knows the homeowners view the museum as a sort of a sprawling oddity. ``The kids around here think it's a spookhouse,'' she said, chuckling.

It has been more than just a local peculiarity in this Davis County community. The museum and the nearby frontier home where her polygamist grandfather raised a family once was honored by the LDS Church's hierarchy. And one of Utah's most notorious murderers once paid a visit.

Cannon says she eventually will spruce up the outside of the museum to make it fit in with the neighborhood's shapely lawns. But the organized clutter inside the museum will always remain and never be put on some out-ofreach pedestal.

``This gives the people an opportunity to be nearer to their history and to see and touch it,'' Cannon said.

Inside, there is no glass case to keep people from brushing over the organ where William Clayton wrote the Mormon hymn ``Come, Come Ye Saints.'' There are neither ropes nor armed guards to keep people from sitting on the benches that Mormon general authorities once occupied at the Salt Lake City Tabernacle.

Handwritten signs are attached to nearly every exhibit, explaining origins and significance. And there is Cannon: 76 years old, leaning on her cane, leading the way through a jumble of weathered pieces her father collected during business trips in the Midwest and on the East Coast.

Wilford Wood sold some of his more important finds to the Mormon Church, including an original uncut 1830 edition of The Book of Mormon and the Smith brothers' genuine death masks, purchased from fellow collectors.

He also sold to the church the Liberty, Mo., jail building where Smith penned some of his most profound writings and a piece of the foundation of the Mormon Temple in Nauvoo, Ill.

But he kept hundreds of other valuables, including aged reproductions of sacred Mormon texts and the death-mask replicas. He also brought home gold pipes from the Salt Lake City Tabernacle organ and pulpits, a player piano, a bookcase constructed by Snow College students for Joseph Smith and a music box from Nauvoo.

Wood dabbled in taxidermy and hung heads of deer, antelope and buffalo on his museum's wall. Joining them are portraits of Mormon prophets, Western scenes and the skins of huge reptiles.

People can wander through the two kitchens in the frontier home where Cannon's grandfather's two wives once cooked. They can read the pages of The Book Of Mormon that wallpaper one of the home's meeting rooms. The only problem is that half of the pages are upside down.

``You could read the whole thing if you stood on your head half the time,'' Cannon said.

In the overgrown back yard stands a 10-foot-tall bronze statue depicting a kneeling Smith receiving the gold plates from the religion's prophet-angel Moroni. The LDS Church gave Wood the statue in thanks for his work in acquiring so many Mormon treasures.

To see it all, visitors only have to call Cannon to get a personal guided tour. That's because the museum has drawn not only the curious but also the infamous.

``I have to be careful,'' Cannon said. ``After all, Mark Hofmann came here once.''

Hofmann visited the museum before he hatched a plot to defraud the Mormon Church with forgeries of historical church documents. To cover his tracks, Hofmann killed two people with pipe bombs. He is serving a life sentence in the Utah State Prison.

George C. Wood, Cannon's grandfather, built the home and outbuilding in 1879 on 55 acres where he grew grapes, nut trees, melons and sugar cane. Cannon doesn't know exactly when the storage building became a museum.

Wilford Wood trapped small animals in the area and went into the fur business. He started collecting LDS memorabilia in the 1920s when he traveled to New York to sell his furs. Wood would stop at antique stores and place ads in local newspapers in hopes of gathering more items, then hold onto his finds until the church bought them. People who heard about the articles he brought home started calling on Wood to see for themselves what he had collected.

``Anything anybody got rid of, he made sure he got it,'' said Cannon, who took over as the museum's caretaker when her father died in 1968.

Cannon's son and grandchildren help her keep up the museum. Still, it probably would be easier on her and her family if they would let colleges and universities take over the collection.

But Cannon doesn't want to lock up her father's work in such pristine surroundings. She recalls that her mother wasn't at all impressed during a tour of a museum at Brigham Young University. ``They took us through their security, and my mother asked what if people wanted to see the articles and touch them. Well, you had to do this, and do that,'' Cannon said.

Sorry. The Wood Museum prefers to operate as Wilford Wood intended. ``You should be allowed to touch the pieces,'' Cannon said. ``This is, after all, our history.''

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To see the museum, call 2927676 or 295-8784 during normal business hours.