TIMELINE FOR MARY’S CITY OF DAVID
1697: Jane Lead assumed leadership of the Philadelphian Society for the Advancement of Piety and Divine Philosophy in London, England.
1792: Joanna Southcott of Devon, England, received the first of many spiritual communications and began her career as religious writer and prophet.
1794: Richard Brothers published A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times.
1814: At age sixty-four, Joanna Southcott announced her miraculous pregnancy. She died shortly thereafter on December 26, 1814.
1815: Southcott follower George Turner became the third Messenger of the faith.
1821: William Shaw, a follower of the Southcottian tradition, became the fourth Messenger.
1822: Shaw died, and John Wroe became the fifth Messenger.
1861 (March 27): Benjamin Franklin Purnell was born In Lewis County, Kentucky.
1862 (November 13): Mary Stallard was born in Scott County, Virginia.
1875: James Roland White joined the Christian Israelite followers of John Wroe at Chatham, England, changed his name to James Jershom Jezreel, and became Wroe’s successor and the sixth Messenger.
1880 (August 3): Benjamin Purnell married Mary Stallard in Aberdeen, Ohio.
1881 (November 29): Coy Purnell was born.
1887 (February 5): Hettie Purnell was born. The Purnells settled in Richmond, Indiana, where Benjamin worked as a broom maker.
1893: Mary and Benjamin Purnell joined the Jezreelite colony of Michael Mills in Detroit, Michigan.
1895: Mary and Benjamin received the graft of the spiritual branch of the messenger tradition. They departed from the Detroit colony to begin their mission.
1902: The Purnell family settled in Fostoria, Ohio. Mary and Benjamin published The Star of Bethlehem and distributed it widely to followers of Wroe and Jezreel, thus establishing the Israelite House of David in the United States and Australia, and themselves as the seventh and final Messengers.
1903 (February 16): Hettie Purnell, age sixteen, was killed by an explosion at the Fox Magazine Cane Company.
1903: The Purnells, along with a few followers, relocated to Benton Harbor, Michigan, filing articles with the State of Michigan on June 4 incorporating the House of David as a voluntary religious organization.
1905 (March): A contingent of eighty-five Australian followers of John Wroe arrived in Benton Harbor to join Mary and Benjamin’s colony.
1908 (January 1): The House of David officially reorganized as a voluntary religious association, with Benjamin and Mary Purnell holding all property and money in trust. Later that year, the Eden Springs Amusement Park opened for business, attracting thousands of tourists.
1913: The House of David organized its first baseball team.
1920 (June 14): Harry T. “Judge” Dewhirst arrived at the colony with his family.
1921 (December 9): Dewhirst was appointed as colony secretary, displacing Francis Thorpe.
1921 (October): John and Margaret Hansel, former colony members, returned to file a bill of complaint in District Court accusing Mary and Benjamin of religious fraud.
1922: The bylaws of the association were rewritten under Judge Dewhirst, eliminating Mary Purnell’s role as founder and co-authority.
ca 1922: Mary Purnell published the third volume of The Comforter.
1923 (January 12–13): Ruth Bamford Reed and Gladys Bamford Rubel filed rape charges against Benjamin Purnell.
1924 (January 27): Coy Purnell died.
1925/1926: Benjamin recalled all copies of Mary’s Comforter, Book III.
1926 (November 17): Michigan State Troopers raided Benjamin Purnell’s home and arrested him, along with several others.
1927 (May 16): The trial of Benjamin Purnell (People vs. Purnell) began.
1927 (November 10): Circuit Judge Louis H. Fead found the House of David guilty of religious fraud and placed the colony in receivership.
1927 (December 8): The Michigan State Supreme Court stayed People vs. Purnell pending appeal and review of receivership litigation.
1927 (December 16): Benjamin Purnell died.
1928: Dewhirst cut off Mary Purnell’s access to colony funds.
1929 (February): The House of David board voted to replace Francis Thorpe with Percy Walker as manager of the traveling baseball team. Thorpe maintained control of the team.
1929 (June 3): Judge Fead’s decision was overturned by the Michigan State Supreme Court.
1930 (April 1): Mary Purnell departed the House of David colony and established the City of David as a separate colony. Judge H. T. Dewhirst officially assumed leadership of the House of David.
1931: Mary Purnell built Paradise Park to attract Jewish clientele.
1932: Mary’s auditorium opened to the public.
1935: Mary’s Vegetarian Café and Mary’s Bakery opened in downtown Benton Harbor
1938: The Gate of Prayer (Shaarei Shomaim) Synagogue was built.
1939 (June 27): King David Hospital opened, which provided kosher meals and services.
1940s: City of David created a basketball team that toured in the 1940s and into the 1950s, playing at times against the Harlem Globetrotters.
1942: A residence was built for Rabbi Harry Goldstein.
1946 (November): Mary Purnell began her 700 Nights of sermons.
1953 (August 19): Mary Purnell died.
1954: Final basketball tour took place.
1965: The synagogue closed.
2001: Ron Taylor, City of David secretary, revived the House of David Echoes as a vintage baseball team, registered with the Vintage Base Ball Association in America.
2009: Mary’s City of David was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
FOUNDERS/GROUP HISTORY
Spouses Mary Purnell (1862–1953) and Benjamin Purnell (1861–1927), the co-founders of the Israelite House of David, were regarded by their followers as the seventh and last of a line of “Messengers,” or prophets. (The messengers may well correspond to the seven angels described in the New Testament book of Revelation 15.) The line of messengers originated in Britain, with the late eighteenth-century British Israelist movement led by Richard Brothers (1757–1824) and the early nineteenth-century millennial prophecies of Joanna Southcott (1750–1814). Born in Devonshire in 1757, Southcott, a domestic servant raised in the Church of England, converted to Wesleyan Methodism around 1792, began publishing and dictating her prophetic visions shortly thereafter, and amassed a considerable following. At the age of sixty-four, Southcott, who was unmarried and claimed no sexual experience, announced that she was to give birth to a child she called the Shiloh, after Genesis 49:10. Although the child never materialized and she died shortly after it was to have been born, the movement itself continued. After Richard Brothers was designated criminally insane and incarcerated in an asylum, the Southcottian movement absorbed most of his following. The House of David designates him as the second Messenger, and Southcott’s followers George Turner and William Shaw as the third and fourth, respectively. In 1822, after Shaw’s death, John Wroe became the fifth Messenger. Under Wroe’s leadership, the group was registered as the Society of Christian Israelites (Christian Israelite Church), and the tradition began its expansion to an international movement.
Originally from rural Kentucky, the Purnells married in 1880 in Aberdeen, Ohio. Like many rural poor in the late nineteenth century, they sought various employment, first as itinerant day laborers, later as traveling preachers. Sometime in 1887, temporarily settled in Richmond, Indiana after the birth of their daughter Hettie, the couple became acquainted with missionaries who followed the teachings of the British mystic and preacher James Jershom Jezreel (1840–1885, formerly James White). Jezreel, considered the sixth Messenger in the Southcottian line after the death of John Wroe (1782–1863), along with his wife Clarissa, better known as Esther, had established several communities of followers throughout the United States. In 1892, Mary and Benjamin Purnell moved to Detroit to join the Jezreelite colony led by Michael Mills. There they remained for two or three years, until Mills was convicted of statutory rape in 1894.
Between 1894 and 1902, the Purnells resumed a life of itinerant preaching. In her memoirs, Mary recounts the years spent walking down railroad tracks, riding bicycles, traveling in a horse drawn wagon, sleeping rough, sheltering occasionally with sympathetic strangers, enduring hunger on occasion. These harsh circumstances, combined with constant preaching and prayer, led to what she describes as a shared, sustained visionary state, during which they collaboratively wrote The Star of Bethlehem (Purnell:1931).
In The Star, published as four volumes in Fostoria Ohio in 1902, they announced that Mary and Benjamin had received the “Visitation” or “graft” (onto the branch of the messenger lineage) while in residence at the Detroit colony, and that together they were the seventh and final Messenger of the Israelite House of David, “Shiloh Twain,” male and female. By widely disseminating The Star through the churches Wroe and Jezreel had already established in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, and establishing themselves as successors to both Wroe and Jezreel, the Purnells consolidated and revitalized the Christian Israelite movement in the United States.
The Purnells left Fostoria after the tragic death of their sixteen-year-old daughter Hettie in a factory fire on February 16, 1903. They arrived in Benton Harbor, Michigan on March 17, purchased land with the assistance of the local well-to-do Jezreelite Baushke family, and legally incorporated the Israelite House of David as a voluntary religious organization on June 4. Targeted missionary trips to Wroeite and Jezreelite colonies in Europe, Australia and elsewhere in the United States, along with wide dissemination of The Star, brought other believers convinced of their purpose and Mary and Benjamin together as the promised seventh Messenger.
Seeking support and occupation for their growing colony, and to establish good public relations within the conservative Midwestern region, the House of David launched a variety of entertainment ventures. They opened Eden Springs amusement park in 1908, and sometime in 1913 formed their first baseball team. This wildly popular venture soon expanded to include traveling teams, a home team, a junior team, and a girls’ team. Music was also extremely important to colony life. Men’s and women’s bands and choruses regularly performed in the park, and in the late 1920s, one of the men’s bands travelled throughout the country as a jazz act.
The colony also purchased considerable acreage around the county, generating wealth for its membership and eventually the larger region through large-scale agricultural endeavors. They expanded to logging operations in northern Michigan, for a short time engaged in shipbuilding, and ran several other operations in Benton Harbor, including a bus service, a trolley line, a hotel, and later an auto dealership and one of the country’s earliest cold storage facilities.
At its peak around 1916, the colony had some 1,000 members. A combination of internal conflict, ongoing scandals culminating in a series of high-profile legal trials, and sensationalistic newspaper coverage of these events all contributed to its eventual decline. In October 1921, John and Margaret Hansel, disgruntled former colony members, filed a complaint in District Court accusing Mary and Benjamin Purnell of religious fraud. Matters intensified when in January 1923, Ruth Bamford Reed and Gladys Bamford Rubel filed rape charges against Benjamin Purnell. On November 17, 1926, Michigan State Troopers raided Benjamin Purnell’s home and arrested him, along with several others.
Despite the highly sensationalized coverage that Benjamin’s trials received in both local and national newspapers, lack of evidence and multiple procedural irregularities within the trial led to the dismissal of the rape charges against Benjamin. In November 1927, Circuit Judge Louis H. Fead did find the House of David guilty of religious fraud and placed the colony in receivership. While the receivership decision was later overturned by the State Supreme Court, the finding of fraud remained. As a condition of being allowed to remain a religious entity, any potential new members were required to sign and legally file a written statement acknowledging the legal determination of fraud, “based upon the court’s finding of immoral and illegal practices and teachings.” While the House of David could accept new members, it ceased actively evangelizing (Adkin 1990:194).
Internal divisions and infighting ultimately proved to be far more detrimental to the colony than the trials. While some scholars speculate that the tension may have originated between Mary and Benjamin themselves, available evidence offers no clear origin point or timeline. Despite suffering ill health after long years of travel and grief over the death of her daughter, Mary took an active and co-equal role in colony administration. Early press releases and ads printed in local newspapers, as well as most important colony publications, including two more editions of The Star published in 1903 and 1910, were signed “Mary and Benjamin,” with her name typically appearing first. According to Colony historian Brian Carroll, Mary and Benjamin preached together in public up until at least 1912, “both clearly considered co-prophets” (Carroll:2024).
Historian Clare Adkin points to the arrival of Harry T. (Judge) Dewhirst and his family on June 14, 1920, as the primary cause of division. A practicing attorney, wealthy, politically well-connected, and highly ambitious, Dewhirst quickly became Benjamin’s close confidante, ingratiated himself with the colony administration and, according to Adkin, set himself almost immediately to marginalizing and displacing Mary. Once appointed to the powerful position of colony secretary, deposing Francis Thorpe who had held the position for over ten years and was one of Mary’s closest confidantes. Shortly thereafter, Dewhirst became one of the colony pillars (members who essentially acted as a board of directors). In 1922, under his influence, the board rewrote colony bylaws in a way that sidelined Mary and granted him control over the colony finances (Adkin:198-207).
Current House of David historians maintain that the rift originated between Mary and Benjamin, and member factions that formed around them, and that Dewhirst acted under Benjamin’s orders (Ziebart:June 12, 2024). Benjamin, now old, ill, and undoubtedly exhausted by his various legal battles, apparently sanctioned and even assisted Dewhirst in his efforts. An unofficial concordance, published by the House of David in 1923 and circulated among only a few members, contains annotations to the third 1910 edition of the Star of Bethlehem suggesting that Benjamin may have planned a new edition, edited to minimize references to the female aspect of the Shiloh (that is, the child whose birth presaged the new millennium, and thus to Mary).
Sometime between 1922 and 1925, Mary Purnell published under her own name the third volume of The Comforter. The Comforter series, published in two previous volumes in 1910 and 1912, strongly emphasized the feminine and maternal aspects of the Shiloh. [Image at right] Benjamin ordered all copies of her book to be destroyed, and printed a scathing criticism. Whether he did so because he truly wished to diminish and discredit his wife, was too ill and exhausted to be fully clear-minded, or Dewhirst was that powerful a manipulator and instigator, remains a matter of debate between the two colonies. It is also unclear exactly when Mary’s name was excised in subsequent publications of texts that previously included both their names, or who exactly gave that order. In her own writings, Mary maintained that Benjamin himself predicted the fracture, and that both regarded it as fulfillment of their larger prophetic goals, a view that current members of the City of David maintain.
It is well documented that after Benjamin’s death in 1927, Dewhirst stepped up his efforts to depose Mary and assume leadership. Between 1928 and 1929, the Dewhirst-led board passed a series of 
further amendments that effectively cut off both her and colony members who supported her from any access to colony finances. Furthermore, Dewhirst and the faction loyal to him took measures to edge out any members who remained loyal to Mary, including attempted replacement of Francis Thorpe as the baseball team manager, refusing them allotments of food and other shared resources, and even threatening violence. The situation became so untenable that in April 1930, amidst the Great Depression, Mary and her followers (roughly half of the colony) established a separate community two blocks east of the original grounds. Dewhirst assumed formal leadership of the remaining members, and membership split irrevocably into two colonies of roughly equal size. Consequently, the two factions formed two schismatic expressions of the faith. The House of David, under Dewhirst, accepted only Benjamin as their messenger, and sought to efface any remaining trace of Mary’s presence and teaching. Mary’s community, now renamed the Israelite House of David as Reorganized Under Mary Purnell, also called the City of David, still regarded Mary and Benjamin as co-messengers, with a particular emphasis on the feminine and maternal aspects that characterized the historic messenger lineage.
While membership waned in both colonies, each continued their various enterprises between the 1930s and 1950s. While the City of David maintained a more religious focus under Mary’s leadership, it also catered to tourists, maintaining a four-story hotel in downtown Benton Harbor and two vegetarian restaurants.
Most notably, Mary Purnell cultivated a Jewish clientele in the City of David. Catering to an underserved demographic typified the sound business sense both she and Benjamin consistently demonstrated. Jewish families, mostly from Chicago, enjoyed vacationing at the few southwest Michigan establishments that welcomed them, and appreciated the fact that Israelite vegetarian offerings aligned with their requirements for kosher meals. Mary strongly differentiated City of David affairs from the former colony under Judge Dewhirst by ensuring that all business ventures remained in alignment with Israelite values, and friendliness toward Jewish people was well in keeping with those values. The British Israelist movement under Richard Brothers held as a primary tenet that Anglo Saxon people were descended from the original lost tribes of Israel. Like many European Christian sects, they regarded Jewish conversion as a precondition of final salvation, and tended toward antisemitism. Mary, however, apparently felt genuine affinity with Jewish people, an affinity incidentally shared by some members of both colonies and some of their descendants (Boyersmith: June 22, 2024).
In 1931, the City of David began building guest cottages on colony grounds, which they called Paradise Park. In 1938, they built an Orthodox synagogue, called Gate of Prayer or Shaarei Shomaim, designed and built to the specifications of the mainly Chicago Roumanian community it served. In 1942, a summer home was built for their Rabbi, Harris L. Goldstein. The colony auditorium hosted Jewish programs and Yiddish plays. A more ambitious project, the kosher King David Hospital, opened in 1939, was unfortunately short-lived. The City of David continued to welcome Jewish vacationers until the early 1960s, and the synagogue remained open until 1965 (Yearwood 2014:11). Mary also contributed to various causes of the Chicago Jewish community, with particular attention to children’s organizations. Colony records of donations made between 1939 and 1941, along with oral accounts and personal recollections from former clientele, lead colony secretary and trustee Ron Taylor to believe that these donations may have been in made toward the kindertransport or similar endeavors to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis (Yearwood:11). Because the United States refused to relax strict immigration laws to accommodate refugees until 1940, these endeavors were typically sponsored by individuals or organizations, who may not have kept official records (Holocaust Encyclopedia n.d.).
The City of David also continued agricultural production and sponsorship of its traveling sports teams. Particularly noteworthy is their association with African American sports history. In 1933, three City of David Players, leased to the House of David team, toured with the Kansas City Monarchs featuring Satchel Paige. In 1940, the City of David team and Monarchs toured together. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, City of David team manager George Anderson toured with Satchel Paige’s All Stars. Anderson also traveled with a Harlem Globetrotters baseball team. A traveling basketball team also sponsored by the City of David faced off against the Harlem Globetrotters in the 1940s and 1950s (Carroll 2024; Ziebart 2024).
While both Mary and Benjamin Purnell combined strong faith with solid business sense, Mary was perhaps the more mystically inclined. In November 1946, at the age of eighty-five, she began her 700 Nights of preaching, during which she would preach at length and in a visionary state. These took place in her parlor, and were open to the public but were attended mostly by her followers.
Although a lifetime of difficulties took their toll on both her physical and mental health, Mary lived to be ninety. She died on August 19, 1953, at home, and was buried in a mausoleum on colony grounds. Her colony persisted with their various farming and business endeavors, until an aging, dwindling membership, and the death of longstanding leaders led to sharp decline in the middle of the twentieth century.
The City of David members began preservation efforts in the late 1990s. In 2001, Ron Taylor brought back baseball in the form of the House of David Echoes, a vintage baseball team that plays other local and regional teams up to the present. He also runs a museum, offers tours, operates a summer gift shop, and regularly gives talks to local historical societies.
DOCTRINES/BELIEFS
The Israelite House of David and the City of David hold the same central set of beliefs. The key texts are the King James Bible including the Apocrypha, along with the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jasher, and numerous writings of Mary and Benjamin Purnell, particularly the Star of Bethlehem. A millennial faith, they await the events described in the book of Revelation and believe that they are among the elect who will live on earth in peace and prosperity for a thousand years after the second coming of Christ. Although according to some interpretations of Revelation 14:1 only 144,000 count among the chosen, according to Benjamin the actual number was 288,000, half men, half women. After this one-thousand-year period, salvation will be secured for all. Mary and Benjamin referred to the colony they created as the “Ingathering,” the calling home of the lost tribes of Israel. Central to their belief is the “life of the body.” This refers to the process of physical purification that prepares the human body for eternal life. They taught that this is accomplished through celibacy, a vegetarian diet, and an ethic of forbearance toward all humanity.
Several factors strongly distinguish The City of David under Mary’s leadership from the House of David as it evolved under Judge Dewhirst. The first is the strong and continued emphasis on Mary and Benjamin as co-messengers. They often referred to themselves as “Shiloh Twain,” alluding to Joanna Southcott’s original prophecy that she would give birth to the Shiloh child, and that together, male and female, they were the ultimate fulfillment of that prophecy. Passages from The Star of Bethlehem reinforce the dual-gender nature of the Shiloh. Newspaper articles from the early years of the colony made it clear that the couple shared colony leadership, and up until around 1910, they typically signed their written work “Mary and Benjamin.”
The second factor is that while both colonies separately maintained various lucrative entertainment ventures, particularly the traveling sports teams, The City of David differed itself from the House of David under Judge Dewhirst in refusing to relax key strictures of the faith in their business practices. Thus, while the House of David under Dewhirst catered to the demands of a post-Prohibition, jazz-age public by selling alcohol and sponsoring such acts as jazz bands and carnivals in some of its establishments, Mary’s restaurants and resort remained strictly alcohol-free.
Although Joanna Southcott acknowledged no influences, and discouraged her followers from acknowledging any other source of revelation, the close parallels between her theology and that of the seventeenth-century Christian mystic Jane Lead, founder of the Philadelphian Society, were noted by some of her contemporaries as well as subsequent followers. James Jezreel, the sixth Messenger, encouraged his own followers to read Lead’s work (Lockley 2016), and Michael Mills, Benjamin Purnell’s discredited predecessor, circulated printed copies of Lead’s “Sixty Propositions” among the membership. Mary Purnell retained one of these copies, and the City of David issued a reprint, along with Lead’s Ascent to the Mount of Vision, in 1932 (Jacobs 2016).
Theologically, the faith is significantly gendered. Originating with Lead, a theme strongly emphasized in Southcott’s teachings, and persistent throughout the messenger line is the idea that Woman, or more specifically the purified female body, is key to salvation. Just as Eve brought sin into the world, the New Eve, “the woman clothed with the sun” (Revelation 12:1) or the virgin bride, would redeem it. This is why Southcott’s never-born Shiloh child became such a key component of the faith, the spirit child of a virgin mother. As the seventh Messenger, Mary and Benjamin together were “Shiloh Twain,” the male and female incarnation of the Child, and also its earthly progenitors. Like Joanna Southcott, Mary was viewed by her followers as the woman clothed with the sun. The Shiloh child is not the messiah, but the cause and predecessor of the second coming of Christ, accompanied by his Bride, who together will engender the new kingdom. Mary and Benjamin together bring the Bride into being in this world, and she will bring Mary and Benjamin with her on the day of resurrection. (Taylor July 2, 2024).
Other elements of the faith in common with Jane Lead’s Philadelphians include the experience of personal revelation, divine wisdom available only to an elect few able to perceive it, and that individual prayer, contemplation, and reflection outside of established churches offer a path to this hidden knowledge. As such, Israelite theology contains a significant mystical and esoteric component, sharing a theological similarity with other American religious communities such as the Ephrata Cloister, the Harmony Society, the Amana colony, and the Hutterites.
Mary’s followers also distinguish between the “foundation ingathering,” the movement established by Mary and Benjamin, and the “Great Ingathering,” essentially Mary’s prophetic reinterpretation of the theology previously established in the Star of Bethlehem. This reinterpretation, spoken in prophetic communications dictated to followers Jennie Martin and Goldie Hansen, and published in the fourth volume of her Comforter, the Book of Heaven, and the Book of Paradise, “center upon the Bride of Christ, the Tree of Life, and Mother Queen of the coming millennial reign of Christ on earth for 1000 years,” during which time Satan will be bound.” Unlike the “foundation ingathering,” available only to the 288,000 chosen, the Great Ingathering is available to all, “as ALL must be given a thorough and unquestionable test in truth to prove the everlasting truth that the spark of divinity is eternal in all mankind” (Taylor, unpublished notes, August 2022).
RITUALS/PRACTICES
In general, the rituals and practices the City of David maintain are common to many Christian communitarian societies. Their practices most closely align with those of the Shakers, while their regular engagement in commerce and larger public life resembles communities such as the Amana colony.
Public preaching, prayer, scriptural study, religious contemplation, and theological discussion are key components of Israelite life. They do not, however, hold formal worship services or build churches. Nor do they specifically observe the Sabbath, preferring to regard every day as holy. With early Christianity and various scriptural passages as their model, in service to their central belief regarding the “life of the body,” they live communally and maintain a vegetarian diet. Although marriage is allowed, they observe celibacy. The men neither cut their hair nor shave their beards. There is no standard dress code. Men and women dress modestly. Women typically keep their hair long and do not wear makeup.
Mary regularly preached to the public from the colony auditorium, and held spiritual gatherings in her parlor every night. Particularly near the end of her life, she regularly prophesied while other members wrote down her words. Members also tell stories of her mystical perceptions. She had prophetic dreams, could find lost objects, perceive when somebody was lying or cheating, foretell events, and generally knew what colony members were up to at any given time. She also occasionally gave radio broadcasts from Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan, a local Seventh-Day Adventist institution.
Although members are expected to be well-versed in the core teachings (including the Bible, the four-volume Star of Bethlehem, several other auxiliary texts, and various writings and sayings of Mary and Benjamin) there is no single interpretation. Theological debates and discussions were common and encouraged, including the merits of competing spiritual movements. At one point, some colony members were interested in the I AM movement, founded in the 1930s, a theosophically-informed precursor of the contemporary New Age movement whose teachings bore some surface similarities to those of the Israelites.
The tradition of open interaction with other like-minded faiths continues to the present, with members attending scholarly conferences that focus on communal societies, and forming collegial relations with others such as the Amana Colonies in Iowa.
ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP
Mary’s community preserved the basic leadership structure that had been established for the House of David. In her time, Mary held unquestioned authority, spiritually and administratively, with close friends and advisers to assist with management and supervisory roles. Francis Thorpe, one of Mary’s closest friends and supporters, served as colony secretary for many years, as well as continuing to manage the baseball teams and extending the business enterprises. Cora Mooney, who had remained close to Mary since she and her husband Silas met them in Fostoria, Ohio, retained her previous role as Mary’s co-manager with a particular focus on supervising personnel and ensuring that Mary’s wishes were carried out. Other trusted companions were designated to carry out key administrative roles, such as overseeing farming operations, management of the resort, hotels, and restaurants, and operation of the printing press.
Currently, the colony secretary carries highest executive authority, serving as the leader over the trustees, who make major legal and financial decisions in an advisory capacity. Rank and file members have voting rights, including women, who held them even in the earliest in the House of David days, well before American women were allowed to vote.
ISSUES/CHALLENGES
Although the City of David survived and even thrived during the Great Depression, Benjamin’s legal troubles, death, and the acrimonious power struggle that ensued between Mary Purnell and Judge Dewhirst and their respective followers took their toll. While individuals and families continued to join, not enough came to offset the steadily aging and celibate population. The colony successfully maintained various financial enterprises for the next several decades and expanded into new ventures, and both maintained an active and overall friendly public presence in the larger community well into the 1960s. By the early 1990s, however, decay, disuse, and the natural ravages of aging had all taken their toll.
Because the City of David maintained some relatively younger members, descendants of late-arriving colonists, they were able to begin necessary preservation efforts in the late 1990s. In 2009, they were included on the National Register for Historic Places as a historic district. These are ongoing, and the community, though small, is stable, thriving, and once again part of public life in southwest Michigan.
SIGNIFICANCE TO THE STUDY OF WOMEN IN RELIGIONS
Largely overshadowed by the reputation, both positive and negative, of the Israelite House of David, the legacy of her husband Benjamin Purnell, and the tendency both within scholarship and popular thought to overlook or diminish female leadership, Mary Purnell, the City of David, and its Israelite theology deserve far more consideration than they have thus far received. Recently, some corrective efforts have laid the groundwork for further scholarship. In 2014, historian Julieanna Frost published the first full-length biography of Mary Purnell. Entitled Worthy Virgins, and notable for its careful and comprehensive focus on Mary’s life and accomplishments, it falls short of providing a clear theological context, treating Mary almost as an individual visionary rather than as a spiritual leader within an established tradition. It also too frequently doubts or discredits its own subject by suggestions, advanced without evidence, that Mary’s visions and prophetic dreams may have originated out of a desire to manipulate her followers or from undiagnosed psychosis.
Librarian Henry M. Yaple’s comprehensive cataloging of colony publications in his Descriptive Bibliography of Imprints from the Israelite House of David and Mary’s City of David (2014) represents and describes the prolific textual legacy of both colonies, and calls attention to the feminine and Mary-specific iconography in the cover images featured in some of the key texts either authored by her or that emphasize her role. While Yaple’s work is meticulous and his interpretive discussion of Israelite iconography is soundly evidence-based, analysis of the content or concepts behind the texts he cataloged was not his primary concern as a librarian.
The strongest and most comprehensive treatments of Israelite theology have emerged from recent renewed interest in Jane Lead and Joanna Southcott. In Jane Lead and her Transnational Legacy (Hessayon:2016), Bridget M. Jacobs and Philip Lockley both painstakingly establish the City of David within the theological lineage of Lead and Southcott (Jacobs 2016; Lockley 2016). Deborah Madden’s contributions to The History of a Modern Millennial Movement (Lockley and Shaw 2017), a volume of essays on the Southcottians, are particularly insightful (Madden 2017a and 2017b). In these essays, Madden clearly outlines the Israelite messenger lineage as a movement with a coherent internal theology that clearly emphasizes the significance of women, and specifically the purified maternal body, as necessary and fundamental to the salvation of humanity.
Mary Purnell, who with her husband co-founded a successful ministry, emerged as a spiritual leader in her own right, preached professionally, and saw to the wellbeing of a lively, productive, and devoted community for half a century that survives to the present day. She authored several theological texts that furthered and continued a theological tradition that dated back two centuries. That tradition, founded by Joanna Southcott, a female visionary, clearly and consistently emphasizes male and female principles of divinity as co-equal, and women as the vessel and source of earthly salvation. Subsequent messengers within the Southcottian movement importantly incorporated theological teachings from Jane Lead’s seventeenth-century Philadelphian movement. Lead drew inspiration from Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), whose mystical and Neoplatonic writings influenced and shaped several other anti-sectarian and anti-denominational Christian movements that found their way to the American colonies: among them the Society of Friends, the Swedenborgian movement, Pietists and non-conformists, and any number of nineteenth-century millennial and utopian movements that informed American religious life. As such, far from being an outlier or short-lived movement springing up around a charismatic leader, Mary Purnell’s life, legacy, and work continue centuries of religious tradition and thought, affording a more complex picture of American Christian life than most historical discourse acknowledges, and placing female leadership firmly within that tradition.
IMAGES
Image #1: Mary Purnell in front of Shiloh House, mid 1940s. Image courtesy of the Israelite House of David.
REFERENCES
Adkin, Clare E. 1990. Brother Benjamin: A History of the Israelite House of David. Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press.
Boyersmith, Deborah. Oral communication. June 22, 2024.
Carroll, Brian. Private email correspondence. June 7, 2024
Frost, Julieanna. 2014. The Worthy Virgins: Mary Purnell and Her City of David. Clinton, NY: Richard W. Couper Press.
Jacobs, Bridget M. 2016. “’A Prophecy Out of the Past’: Contrasting Treatments of Jane Lead Among Two North American Twentieth-Century Millenarian Movements: Mary’s City of David and the Latter Rain.” Pp. 267–90 in Jane Lead and her Transnational Legacy, edited by Ariel Hessayon. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Lockley, Philip. 2016. “Jane Lead’s Prophetic Afterlife in the Nineteenth-Century
English Atlantic.” Pp. 241-66 in Jane Lead and her Transnational Legacy, edited by Ariel Hessayon. London: Palgrave Macmillan
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Madden, Deborah. 2017b. “Israelites in America: The House of David and Mary’s City of David.” Pp. 140-63 in The History of a Modern Millennial Movement: The Southcottians, edited by Philip Lockley and Jane Shaw. London: I. B. Tauris & Co.
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Purnell, Mary. 1931. Mary and Benjamin’s Travels. Benton Harbor, MI: City of David.
Taylor, R. James. 1996. Mary’s City of David, a Pictorial History of the Israelite House of David as Reorganized by Mary Purnell. Benton Harbor, MI: City of David.
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Yaple, Henry M. 2014. A Descriptive Bibliography of Imprints from the Israelite House of David and Mary’s City of David, 1902-2010. Clinton, NY: Richard W. Couper Press.
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SUPPLEMENTARY RESOURCES
Mary’s City of David: Israelite House of David as Reorganized by Mary Purnell. 1930. Accessed from https://www.maryscityofdavid.org/ on 16 June 2024.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. n.d. “The Immigration of Refugee Children to the United States.” Holocaust Encyclopedia, August 31, 2022. Accessed from https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-immigration-of-refugee-children-to-the-united-states on 3 July 2024.
Publication Date:
19 July 2024
