Frontier communal idea may be taking last gasp
 
By Mark Shaffer
The Arizona Republic - Flagstaff Bureau
 
COLORADO CITY - It once had been a common concept among far-flung Mormon villages throughout the frontier West.

A united order of like-minded individuals lived on communal property and donated the returns from their labor to a general fund to benefit all living in the community. In the southern Utah town of Orderville, the people even ate under one roof.

The utopian way of life survived into the turn of the 20th century in the northern Arizona community of Joseph City after brief turns in Snowflake, Sunset and other Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints settlements.

But 100 years later, the last vestige of the united order, the so-called United Effort Plan in the twin polygamist towns of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, is in the cross hairs of the Utah court system.

The leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a polygamist sect that has no affiliation with the mainstream Mormon Church, were all stripped of their trustee positions on the United Effort Plan board on June 23.

A hearing is scheduled today in Utah District Court in Salt Lake City to consider appointing a new board of trustees. The new board could decide to dissolve the trust and put the property in the hands of the sect adherents who have lived on it for years.

Historian Charles Peterson of St. George, Utah, an expert on Mormon colonization of Arizona and southern Utah, said it is "certainly remarkable" that the UEP has survived to this day.

"Just to think that early 19th-century values represented by Joseph Smith could still be around today defies belief," Peterson said.

According to LDS theology, Smith, the religion's first prophet, received a revelation known as the law of consecration in the 1830s.

It commanded that all members deed their property to a bishop over each community, and the bishop, as a trustee, in turn would convey back to the head of each family what was needed for the well-being of the family.

Later, then-church leader Brigham Young spread the message of the united order in visits to southern Utah during the mid-1870s.

The polygamist leaders of Colorado City, which was called Short Creek until the 1950s, had hoped to lock that practice into place permanently.

Polygamy was banned by the LDS before Utah became a state in 1896.

The multiple-marriage FLDS sect had a communal sharing system in place throughout the early part of the 1900s but formalized it in the UEP in 1938.

According to a text of a sermon by the former prophet of the two communities, Leroy Johnson, in the early 1940s, the UEP was described as an "irrevocable trust that neither lawyers nor apostates could break apart."

Ben Bistline, a Colorado City historian who lives in the nearby community of Cane Beds, experienced life in the UEP firsthand in the early 1950s.

"I would go and cut timber on Mount Trumbull and turn in my check to the united order. Then, I would go down to the warehouse and get what I needed," Bistline said.

"Later, it went to a straight 10 percent tithe of your paycheck."

But now, Bistline said, "we just need to get rid of this (UEP) monster."
 
azcentral.com
Originally published August 4, 2005
 
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