Meet the New Neighbors
A fugitive sect of Mormon polygamists is building a home – and an end-time temple
The town of Eldorado, Texas, seat of Schleicher County, flanks State Highway 277, approximately 45 miles south of San Angelo, and is surrounded by a vast landscape of mesquite and cedar trees, native grasses, cacti, and lizards. In all, it is a fairly typical West Texas town of about 2,000, mostly oil industry workers, goat ranchers, and their herds. At least it was typical until November 2003, when a man from Utah named David Steed Allred came to town to purchase 1,691 acres of ranchland four miles north of Eldorado's sleepy downtown. Allred was in the construction business, he told several residents, and was going to transform the land into a corporate hunting retreat where he could entertain clients from Las Vegas – which might work out fine, if Allred's clients were going to be interested in traveling that far just to bag a few white-tailed deer.
It was an odd explanation, perhaps, but in a town of independent West Texans, not so odd as to spark more than a general curiosity about the new neighbor. "I knew when
was sold that someone from Utah bought it and I figured they were probably Mormon," says Randy Mankin, the 49-year-old editor and publisher of The Eldorado Success, the town's weekly newspaper. There were already a couple of other Mormon families living in town, Mankin said, so even that wasn't so unusual – or so he thought. But that was before the construction began.
Two months later, Mankin was in the Success office on South Main Street when a local pilot walked in and dropped a computer disk on his desk. The disk, the pilot said, contained digital photos of construction in progress on the property that he'd snapped while flying over the spread; Mankin popped the disk in his computer and scrolled through the photos. What he saw was both stunning and confusing: a fledgling network of roads, a grouping of trailer homes, and three dormitory-sized, log-home-style buildings. It was, to say the least, intriguing: What in the hell was Allred building? With a combination of old-fashioned reporting and a dose of kismet – in the form of a telephone call from an anti-polygamist activist from Phoenix, Ariz., named Flora Jessop – it wasn't long before Mankin and his wife, Kathy, figured it out. On March 25, 2004, the Success broke the first in an ongoing string of stories that not only confirmed the construction was unusual, and not at all what Allred had claimed, but was also major news – not just in Eldorado, but across the country and around the world.
As it turned out, Allred's story about his buying the land for a hunting retreat was just that, a story....cont'd
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2005-07-29/pols_feature.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
