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| Original signage still there. All pictures sourced from Wikipedia. |
In San Juan County, Utah, not too far from the town of Monticello there lies a little property with some abandoned and unfinished buildings and was known at it's zenith as "Home of Truth". The place was the home of a very small cult known as the School of Truth who followed a woman by the name of Marie Ogden.
The story starts with Marie being a wealthy and active member of the community in Newark, New Jersey. However, after the death of her husband in 1929, she became increasingly obsessed with communicating with her husband beyond the grave via spiritualism to find the cause of his death and the reason and purpose for life. After a brief stint with the "League of the Liberators" cult, she created her own following by going on a lecture circuit while claiming to be receiving revelation via her typewriter automatically typing messages to her.
While on her tour in Boise, Idaho, she announced that she would be creating a commune/collective farm community in the mountains to be away from "city life" and stated she saw the place to create/settle it in a vision. So, in 1933, she and 21 of her followers found the place they would set up her collective on farmland in Dry Valley, Utah not far from Church Rock, where Marie claimed the second coming of Christ would happen.
The compound they created had 23 buildings spread across a couple miles of land that was separated into three portions called the inner portal, middle portal, and outer portal. The inner portal is where Marie set up her home and lived with her daughter, and said it was constructed on the the exact center of the Earth's axis, to be the only survivable shelter to endure the "calamities of the last days".
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| Houses in the "inner portal" |
Life in the compound was typical of other extreme cults of that size, which had strict rules of giving up all personal possessions along with dietary restrictions of no alcohol, tobacco, or meat of any kind. Men were generally assigned to work on the farm, with women tending to domestic chores. There was never any electricity on the site, nor any running water, with only a well being the primary source of it. Furniture was also locally made by hand with only the occasional supplies being bought by Marie herself when going to nearby Monticello. Despite the harsh living conditions, the number of followers increased to roughly 100 by about 1935.
As time went on, it was said that Maire would go to the top of nearby Shay Mountain to receive additional revelations and was reported to have made increasingly outlandish claims as time went on. In 1934, she started her own newspaper in order to spread her metaphysical ideas to the local community as well as she increasingly taught from the Aquarian Gospel to her followers.
However everything came to a head after a member of her congregation died of cancer, whose name was Edith Peshak in February of 1935. This in of itself was not shocking, but rather the fact that Marie was insistent that Edith was in a state of "purification" and could soon be brought back to life, which started Marie's downfall. Marie insisted on keeping the corpse out and had allegedly washed it three times a day in a salt solution and "fed" it milk and eggs by injection.
After two years, there were increasing rumors of the cult's extremism and the fact no resurrection of Edith had occurred, despite Marie continually insisting that it would happen soon and refusing to sign a death certificate. By this time, many had become disillusioned with the cult and left the compound, only 7 followers still residing after that point. Marie was eventually arrested in 1937 and forced to sign a death certificate, but the body of Edith was never recovered. Some in her cult insisted that it was cremated shortly after an investigation was started.
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| The unfinished stone chapel. |
In later years, Marie became a piano teacher to children in the town of Monticello to make ends meet, and eventually died in a nursing home in Blanding, Utah in 1975, with The Home of Truth property being privately sold to prevent the government from seizing it to pay for Ogden's care. Currently, the buildings there are in a poor state of repair, with the unfinished stone chapel and inner portal fencing and homes being some of the most prominent you can still see.
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