The House of David: Benton Harbor's Bearded Baseball Commune

In nineteen oh three, a preacher named Benjamin Purnell arrived in Benton Harbor with a vision. He believed he was the seventh messenger of God, charged with reuniting the twelve lost tribes of Israel before the coming millennium. He founded a communal colony called the Israelite House of David, and over the next two decades it grew into one of the strangest and most successful religious communes in American history.

Members turned over all personal property when they joined. They practiced celibacy, ate no meat, and never cut their hair or trimmed their beards. That last detail made them famous. By the nineteen teens, the colony had several hundred members, a working farm, a canning operation, an amusement park, and a miniature railroad that drew day-trippers from Chicago. They were industrious, sober, and deeply weird by the standards of mainstream Michigan, and they were also, improbably, very good at baseball.

The House of David baseball team began playing public games around nineteen thirteen. By the nineteen twenties they were a barnstorming sensation, traveling the country in their own bus, their long beards flowing, playing exhibition games against local teams and occasionally against Negro League stars. Satchel Paige pitched for them. Grover Cleveland Alexander, a World Series champion in the twilight of his career, pitched for them too. The team was less a religious statement than a financial engine and a recruitment tool, drawing crowds who had never heard of Benton Harbor.

The commune's collapse came with scandal. In the mid-nineteen twenties, more than a dozen young women in the colony accused Benjamin Purnell of sexual abuse. The trial lasted months, produced fifteen thousand pages of transcript, and drew national coverage. Purnell was convicted of fraud but died of tuberculosis before sentencing, in nineteen twenty-seven. The colony split in two, and both factions continued operating for decades. The baseball team played on into the nineteen fifties.