Israelite House of David (historical)

Benjamin and Mary Purnell moved from Fostoria, Ohio, to Benton Harbor, Michigan, in March 1903 with a small group of Christian Israelite followers who held Benjamin to be the successor, in a prophetic lineage traced to the English prophetess Joanna Southcott, tasked with gathering Israel's 144,000 before the end times. Converts sold their property and deeded it to the colony on entry; a preaching tour of Australian Christian-Israelite congregations soon brought roughly 85 additional migrants, and by 1910 membership exceeded 400 across some 1,000 acres of colony farmland, growing to about 1,000 by 1916. The colony's celibacy vows, communal dormitories separating spouses and children, and unpaid labour in its many enterprises -- a barnstorming baseball team, jazz bands, the Eden Springs amusement park, a cannery, cold storage and lumber operations -- made it both nationally famous and, to critics, a target for lawsuits by former members seeking back wages or the return of surrendered property.

Allegations that Benjamin was sexually abusing women and underage girls at the colony, framed internally as religious "purification," accumulated through the 1910s and 1920s and led to a 1923 grand jury investigation and his arrest in November 1926 on a charge of statutory rape. The subsequent Michigan proceeding, which the state brought against Purnell and the colony itself alleging religious fraud, "gross immoralities," perjury, and obstruction of justice, generated more than 15,000 pages of testimony and international press coverage. The presiding judge found the House of David to be a fraudulent religion and ordered it into receivership; Purnell died about a month later, in December 1927, of complications from diabetes and tuberculosis, without further criminal prosecution. Less than a year after the trial, the Michigan Supreme Court overturned the receivership order, ruling that it had violated the First Amendment's protection of religious freedom -- a reversal on constitutional rather than factual grounds that the record should note explicitly, since it left the underlying findings about Purnell's conduct undisturbed while restoring the colony's legal autonomy.

Purnell's death triggered a leadership struggle that split the colony in 1930 into two roughly equal factions: some 217 members, including most farm workers and the baseball players, followed Mary Purnell to found Mary's City of David nearby, while a similar number remained under Benjamin's chosen successor, Judge Harry T. Dewhirst, at the original site. Both communities built further successful businesses through the mid-20th century -- Mary's group opened a resort and synagogue serving Orthodox Jewish vacationers, plus a hotel, bakery, and vegetarian café -- but both shrank steadily as elderly members died; by 1990 only 21 House of David members and 18 at Mary's City of David remained, and both organisations survive today mainly as small board-governed archives preserving the colony's extensive historical records.