Colorado City, Arizona – The prairie clothes, gated communities and distrust of strangers that were once hallmarks of two towns on the Arizona-Utah border are mostly gone.
These days, Colorado, Arizona, and neighboring Hilldale, Utah, look like any other town in this remote, scenic area near Zion National Park, with weekend football games, a few bars, and even a winery.
Until the courts took control of it Cities From a polygamous sect whose leader and prophet, Warren Jeffswas imprisoned for sexually assaulting two girls, and youth sports, cocktail hours, and many other corporate activities were banned. The towns turned around so quickly that they were released from court-ordered supervision last summer, nearly two years earlier than expected.
It wasn’t easy.
“What you’re seeing is the result of a tremendous amount of internal turmoil and change within people to reset themselves,” said Willie Jessup, a spokesman for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who later split from the sect. “We call it ‘Life After Jeeves’ — and frankly, it’s a great life.”
Some former members have fond memories of growing up in the FLDS, describing mothers who took care of each other’s children and played sports with other kids in town.
But they say things got worse after Jeffs took over after his father died in 2002. Families were broken up by church leaders who fired men deemed unworthy and reassigned their wives and children to others. On Jeeves’ ordersChildren were pulled from public schools, basketball hoops were removed, and followers were told how to spend their time and what to eat.
“Things started going in a very dark, evil cult direction,” said Shem Fisher, who left the towns in 2000 after the church divided his father’s family. He later returned to open an inn in Hilldale.
Church members settled in Colorado City and Hilldale in the 1930s so they could continue to practice polygamy after the sect broke away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the mainstream Mormon church that abandoned plural marriage in 1890.
After authorities were shocked by the backlash from the disastrous 1953 FLDS raid, they turned a blind eye to urban polygamy until Jeffs took power.
After being charged in 2005 with arranging the marriage of a teenage girl to a 28-year-old subordinate who was already married, Jeffs went on the run, making the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list before his arrest the following year. In 2011, V. was convicted Texas For sexually assaulting two girls aged 12 and 15, they were sentenced Life in prison.
Even years after Jeffs’ arrest, federal prosecutors accused the towns of being run as an arm of the church and depriving non-adherents of basic services such as building permits, water hookups and police protection. In 2017, the court placed the towns under control supervision, Eradicating the Church from their governments and their combined police department. Separately, oversight of the trust that controlled the church properties was handed over to the community council, which was selling them.
The cities had operated for 90 years largely as a theocracy, so they had to learn how to run a “first-generation representative government,” as Roger Carter, the court-appointed comptroller, noted in his progress reports.
The DLF controlled most township land through a trust, allowing its leaders to dictate where their followers could live, so private property ownership was new to many. People who are not accustomed to openness and government policies need clarification about whether decisions are based on religious affiliation.
Although the towns had received direction from the sect in the past, their civilian leaders were now prioritizing the needs of residents, Carter wrote before the court lifted the censorship last July.
With its leader in prison and stripped of his control over the cities, many SLF members have left or moved away from the sect. Other places of worship opened, and practicing FLDS members are now believed to represent only a small percentage of the cities’ population.
Hilldale Mayor Donya Jessup, who was distantly related to Willie Jessup through marriage, said the community has made great strides. Like others, I was able to reconnect with family members who had been separated by the church and stopped speaking to each other.
When a 2015 flood in Hilldale killed 13 people, she was one of many former residents who returned to help search for missing loved ones. She had the opportunity to visit her sister, whom she had not seen in years.
“We began to realize that the love was still there — that my sister, who I had not been able to speak to for so many years, was still my sister, and she missed me as much as I missed her,” the mayor said. “And it just starts opening doors that weren’t open before.”
Longtime resident Isaac Wheeler said that after the FLDS kicked him out in 2004, he was ostracized by the people he grew up with, a local store wouldn’t sell him animal feed, was refused service at a burger joint and police ignored his complaints that his farm was being vandalized.
Things are very different now, he said. Wheeler said one reason is that his religious affiliation no longer influences his encounters with police. The FLDS-operated feed store, burger restaurant and grocery store were replaced by a supermarket, bank, pharmacy, café and bar.
“Like a normal city,” he said.
People without FLDS connections have also moved on.
Gabby Olsen, who grew up in Salt Lake City, first came to the towns in 2016 as an intern for a climbing and canoeing guide service. I was drawn to the mountains, valleys, fresh air and 300 days of sunshine every year.
She said people ask “all the time” if she would actually move to a place known for polygamy, but it didn’t bother her.
“When you say to people, ‘Hey, we’re getting married in Hilldale,’ they kind of laugh, because they don’t really know what it’s about,” said Dion Obermeyer, Olsen’s husband, who runs the service with her. “But of course when they all came here, they were all very amazed. And you say, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s a winery.'”
Even as the influence of the FLDS has waned, it has not completely disappeared and cities are dealing with some new issues.
Residents say the new openness has brought common community problems like drug abuse to Hilldale and Colorado City.
Some people still practice polygamy: Colorado City Sect member With more than 20 spiritual “wives,” including 10 underage girls, he was sentenced in late 2024 to 50 years in prison for coercing girls into sexual acts and other crimes.
Brielle Decker, who was eighteen when she became Jeffs’ sixty-fifth “wife” in an arranged marriage, turned her back on the church. These days, she works at a residential support center in Colorado that serves people leaving polygamy.
Decker, now 40 and remarried with a child, said she believes it will take several generations to recover from Jeffs-era FLDS abuses.
“I think they can, but it will take time because a lot of people are in denial,” Decker said. “However, they want to blame someone. They don’t really want to take responsibility.” ___
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP cooperation With The Conversation US, funded by Lilly Endowment Inc., the AP is solely responsible for this content.