Cults: The Moribund Kingdom of Ben

Riding a milk-white steed, dazzlingly attired in a white flannel suit and golden necklace with ruby pendant, bewhiskered, 240-lb. Benjamin Purnell cut a commanding figure around the Michigan fruit-marketing community of Benton Harbor. A grade-school dropout who was the master of mostly untaught arts, he was the self-proclaimed Seventh Messenger of Christ. Though one coruscant message was celibacy, Purnell was accused more than once of seducing teen-age girls in so-called purification rites. Another tablet from Purnell’s private Sinai was the promise of earthly immortality, a cup that Ben himself let pass, dying in 1927 of tuberculosis, diabetes, hardening of the arteries, asthma, interstitial nephritis and a leaky heart.

Undaunted by his demise, Purnell’s reverent followers to this day keep his shrunken body embalmed within the 130-acre colony where he reigned as King Ben of the House of David. But immortality has proved equally elusive for the faithful, and death has succeeded, where scandal and scoffery failed, in dooming the perfervid, long-thriving sect. Once the House of David had 1,200 members, controlled a business empire valued at $10,000,000, and won nationwide fame as a communal colony whose male members kept their beards unshaved and locks uncut in emulation of Christ. Today, in pathetic contrast, its membership has dwindled to barely 90, all but a few of them over 65. By last week most members of the House of David had signed up for Medicare.

Predestined Harbor. For shiftless, Kentucky-born Ben Purnell, the road to Benton Harbor was a circuitous one. After traveling around the U.S. in the 1890s in a carnival wagon, he landed in Detroit and made off with 200 followers of the Israelite faith founded by 18th century English Fanatic Joanna Southcott. Because the Lord was “bent on harboring people,” Purnell decided that Benton Harbor was their predestined home.

The cult still has expansive holdings, but it long ago misplaced both its proselytizing and promotional zeal. The House of David’s barnstorming baseball team, its most renowned attraction for 25 years, was disbanded back in 1937. Also gone are Chic Bell’s bearded touring musicians. The colony’s picturesque Benton Harbor amusement park once attracted 200,000 visitors a year, now draws fewer than 30,000. So depleted are the ranks that outsiders have to be hired to operate the shabby House of David Hotel in downtown Benton Harbor. Sighs pigtailed Tom Dewhirst, 58, head of the Benton Harbor Chamber of Commerce: “Nothing new has happened around here in 30 years.”

Private Siberia. Though slowed by age, surviving members go on doing their assigned chores. In the colony’s crafts shop last week, Frank Rosetta, 73, and Reg Herbison, 81, were still making picture frames and statuettes for the tourists. From her apartment in “Jerusalem,” one of the House of David’s less than paradisaical buildings, Ada Jeffrey was minding the colony’s dairy operation as she has done for 60 years. They do not expect to wait too long for the Millennium, when they will be among God’s 144,000 elect, as King Ben had always promised.

Under his firm rule, it was from the start an autarchic colony, raising its own vegetarian food supplies, running its private bakery, print shop and greenhouses. For a time, the colony even had its own Siberia, a Lake Michigan island to which backsliders were banished to brood on their sins. Since man was evil, members could marry but were supposed to remain celibate—notwithstanding King Ben’s example.

The same precepts are followed today, but as one oldtimer said recently: “They don’t seem so important to us any more. Now it takes all we can do just to live from day to day.” In any case, the House of David has not taken a new member since Paul Johnson was converted ten years ago. Now 32, Johnson runs two of the sect’s apple orchards, dutifully puts the profits in the common kitty. Youngest member of the House of David by far, he may also turn out to be its last—and, not incidentally, sole mortal heir to the remaining riches of the Kingdom of Ben.