Where is centennial park polygamy usa

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Colorado City, Ariz. The park looks good, too. After years of atrophy, tables and benches were painted for the July Fourth community party. Broken windows have been replaced in the restrooms and outbuildings. On Central Street, the new Dollar General store is open. In adjoining Hildale, Utah, a dentist plans to open a practice. A music festival is set for October. More parents are enrolling their children in the public schools.

And George Jessop would like to start a restaurant. It would be called "The Destination. Jessop knows that the tradition of polygamy in Colorado City and Hildale, collectively known as Short Creek, would attract visitors, too. Short Creek, once known as an isolated enclave for polygamists who didn't say hello to strangers, is threatening to become a conventional American community.

More and more people are leaving the FLDS and the rigid prohibitions imposed by its leaders. Dissenters are reunifying with people who split from the faith earlier, and they want contact and commerce with the rest of the world. There are nearby national forests on both sides of the state line. According to the Utah Department of Transportation, an average of 3, vehicles rolled past Hildale daily in At the moment, Short Creek is doing almost nothing to make tourists stop there. Next to that station is the Merry Wives Cafe, which offers a menu of sandwiches, french fries and salads, and a Subway restaurant.

Jessop sees the omissions as openings. In addition to opening The Destination, Jessop, 49, wants to start a tour company to take visitors to petroglyphs in the area. Jessop manages Most Wanted and already takes some of its guests on such a tour. Instead, the community will hold a Victorian era themed dance. The dance is a way to celebrate the New Year as a community. It's also a chance for the younger generations to learn the traditional ways and social graces of their elders.

In the polygamous community of Centennial Park near the Utah-Arizona border, everything is about growth - children, families, even the town itself.

But, with growth, come plenty of growing pains. The town itself was born only less than 30 years ago. As families grow with more wives and kids, responsibilities increase. And as children come of age, they must choose between growing up in - or growing away from - the church. Articles were often accompanied by photos of mothers and their crying children being herded onto buses. People started building hideouts where they could store food and shelter their families for long enough that whoever came looking would have to go away.

Even now, on the cliffside behind Short Creek, there are some old grain silos and a dark, ominous cavern with a metal gate. When Jeffs ran Short Creek, everyone from the priesthood to law enforcement to many parents followed his law first and the law of the land second—if they followed it at all. Children have been denied an education outside the church or freedom of choice; underage girls have been forced into marriage. Girls grow up being taught that the only role for women is to get married and make babies.

But in Centennial Park, the neighboring community that split off from Short Creek when Rulon Jeffs took power, women have a different view of plural marriage. Here, where the wives share a single large home with their husband, the women become a support network for each other. Some of the women are first wives while others married into families that already had one or more wives.

Centennial Park is unique from other plural-marriage-practicing groups like the Kingston Clan or Apostolic United Brethren in a few ways. Furthermore, women choose the family they want to enter into.

These wives are fed up with the narrative surrounding their way of life. The women agreed that it was an ugly face to put on plural marriage. She took over a room in the house, helped with the laundry, and even got Christmas presents for all the children—whether biologically related to her or not. The practice of one man having multiple wives predates most religious texts and is about maximizing potential for offspring. In an era when helicopter parenting has become the norm and some parents will cheat and bribe to get their kids into a halfway-decent college, most well-off parents would rather push fewer children to succeed.

Plural marriage seems out of date and repressive, and it carries a heavy social stigma. Instead, many urban and liberal people are turning toward polyamory, where people can and do have committed relationships with multiple partners at the same time.

In a plural family where everyone lives in the same home, they receive the support that comes from communal living in terms of child care, chores, and even friendship from their sister-wives. Ultimately, the differences come down to whether the institution of marriage enters the picture; from there, it gets murkier. The fundamental question about whether plural marriage can exist without exploitation centers on whether women raised in polygamous households or communities are able, by virtue of their upbringing, to make a real choice about whether they want to enter into a plural marriage.

Separating where upbringing ends and choice begins is difficult, if not impossible. Marrying young is common in mainstream Latter-day Saints culture in the United States, as is having many children— 3.

Hansen-Park notes that while most of the people in town grew up with multiple mothers, few are in plural marriages today. She, along with many others, have come to see the goal as not fighting against plural marriage but integrating those who practice it into mainstream society. Most of these children in the Creek, even those who have wished to leave, love their multiple mothers.

Dating back to September , a number of animals in town were shot with guns or pellet guns; after a local animal shelter issued a PSA last June, arguments broke out over the custom of shooting strays for target practice, or for wandering onto adjacent property. In May , the governments of Hildale and the then-FLDS-controlled Colorado City worked together to appoint a new police chief through an intergovernmental agreement.

Even when crimes were reported to the police, the police allowed it to be handled at a church level. So the two governments decided the best candidate for the job would be a complete outsider.

He lives in St. George, about 40 miles away. He suspects the high incidence has more than a little to do with the population of children without parents. Under Jeffs, many children were reassigned to different families—sometimes multiple times.

They never formed an adult-child bond with anybody. Kids break into the many large, vacant homes. They break windows. They set fires. But he wants people to feel that they can trust their local police regardless of their religious affiliations, and it would be impossible to do so if people thought the police were interested in ripping their families apart. Recently, he had an FLDS school walk to the police station for a visit.

The kids ranged from 4 to Askerlund spends time meeting with other agencies, conducting weekly phone calls about the state of Short Creek. Despite the change, he wants to make sure FLDS members still feel like this is their home. They built this community. When Shirlee Draper left the FLDS and drove away with her four children in , she thought she was done with the town for good.

George, Utah—less than 50 miles away. Sure enough, Hyrum was right. Days later the Brethren, who have a direct line to God, phoned the year-old and told him a woman wanted to marry him.

After hanging up Hyrum explained that 'there is a girl that wants to marry me. Her name is Kellie and that's all I really know about her'. The women, who wear makeup and regular, if modest, clothing choose their husbands husband through prayer and counsel with church elders.

God, they believe instructs them. They cannot marry until they are The community's' spiritual marriages are preordained and last through eternity, the fundamentalists believe, and having children and living a polygamist life is thought to be God's will. In Centennial Park the missionaries, who are young men often just out of high school, do everything for the town from garbage collection to handyman services while they work on their morals and prepare to hopefully be husband and fathers.

But Hyrum had a long wait and was kept as a missionary longer than the average two years. He played by rules all the while hoping to one day get a phone call that God speaking via the Priesthood Council, aka the Brethren had agreed he was worthy enough, ready and chosen to marry.

Kellie, who was born in Salt Lake City but has lived in Centennial Park for seven years, said the name 'Hyrum' kept popping in head starting in the 10th grade so she prayed about it for years.

In Centennial Park the women choose who they marry. They believe that God has a preordained husband in mind and they will just 'know' who they should marry, but no one can marry until they are 18 so Kellie had to wait. While he waited he could not date and was almost never around women to whom he wasn't not related. One episode showed him organizing a basketball tournament in the hopes a girl would notice him and the elders would respect him. Unspoken throughout the show, and Hyrum's angst, is that fact that with each man married to multiple women many men would, by sheer mathematics, wind up with no wife at all.

But Kellie, with God's voice helping out, chose Hyrum. Like her intended she was raised in the church, saved herself for marriage and never dated. Quick to blush, the recent high school graduate was born in Salt Lake City and had lived in Centennial Park for seven years. She explained that Hyrum is her destiny. Not only can women not wed till they are 18, but also unlike the FLDS from which some residents moved decades ago women in Centennial Park wear makeup, modern if modest clothing and style their hair however.

Kellie has remained 'virtuous' for marriage. After years of praying and coming to believe God intended she marry Hyrum, she took it to the Brethren.

Several months later they told her they agreed that the pair should marry. And I prayed about it clear til graduation. Hyrum's end of the betrothal was considerably less time consuming. And I said yes and that's how it went down. He has openly looked forward to his wedding and to the pleasures of marriage for years. Once the engagement was official the new couple talked on the phone before their first outing, a short hike to the site of Centennial Park's future temple.