We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket … One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and another of domestic hired service; and another of the State.
The Harmonists had gathered to lead lives that would prepare them for the Second Coming of Christ, which they were certain was right around the corner. The society was communist, with no privately held property, and all worked for the common good. They felt they were following the model of the primitive Christian church—“united to the community of property adopted in the days of the apostles,” said their Articles of Association. They also practiced celibacy, believing it to be a higher state than marriage. Both these ideas would turn up in Teed’s program.
Teed continued, reluctantly, to stay on the move, trying various towns in New York and Pennsylvania. Around the time he visited the Harmonists, his wife’s health took a bad turn, and she went with their son, Douglas, to live with her sister in Binghamton, where she remained until her death in 1885. Teed seems to have largely put them behind him to become the new hollow earth messiah. After his wife’s death, Douglas was taken in by a Mrs. Streeter, who supported him emotionally and financially and also provided the means for him to study art in Italy. Teed had other things on his mind.
In 1878, he visited another successful utopian community, the Shaker enclave at Mount Lebanon, New York, near the Massachusetts border just west of Pittsfield. According to Peter Hicks he was admitted as a member in the North Family there. This was the first formal Shaker community, consisting then of almost four hundred people, and one of fifty-eight such Shaker groups scattered as far west as Kentucky.
The Shakers had come together around Ann Lee, an Englishwoman born in 1736. At twenty-three she joined a Quaker society of a spirited sort that earned them the nickname “Shaking Quakers” because of the way they shook, whirled, and trembled to be rid of evil. They suffered persecution, and in 1770 Ann Lee had her illumination in jail. “By a special manifestation of divine light the present testimony of salvation and eternal life was fully revealed to her,” as a Shaker history from 1859 puts it. Ann Lee learned that she was the Second Coming of Christ, and in 1773 “she was by a direct revelation instructed to repair to America” to establish “the second Christian Church.” (It was also revealed that the colonies would win the coming war and that “liberty of conscience would be secured to all people.”) With seven followers (including her soon to be ex-husband and brother), Mother Ann, as she was now known, came to New York in 1774 and eventually settled in the wilderness a few miles northwest of Albany. Their numbers swelled in 1780 when seekers from a Baptist religious revival in nearby New Lebanon found them and then brought others to hear Ann Lee speak, and then to remain as part of the community. But their troubles weren’t over. Accused of being “unfriendly to the patriotic cause,” several of their number, including Mother Ann, were jailed in Albany until December 1780, when they were finally pardoned by Governor George Clinton. Mother Ann died at Watervliet in 1784 at forty-nine, on the land she had first settled, but the society she began continued to thrive.
Teed would have found much to admire and ponder about the Shakers at Mount Lebanon. Like him, Ann Lee had been the Second Coming of Christ. She had received no special instruction about the earth being hollow and people living inside the cosmic egg, but she too believed God has a dual male and female nature. Like the Harmonists, the Shakers practiced communalism as it seemed to derive from the primitive church, were celibate, and believed in equality of the sexes—all ideas that Teed incorporated into his Koreshan community. Like the Quakers, the Shakers were pacifist nonresisters. Two things chiefly set them apart. One was their spiritualism. “We are thoroughly convinced,” wrote Shaker Elder George Lomas in 1873, “of spirit communication and interpositions, spirit guidance and obsession. Our spiritualism has permitted us to converse, face to face, with individuals once mortals, some of whom we well knew, with others born before the flood.”41 The other was their exuberance when this spirit struck them. In the main, their services were sober and restrained. But when the spirit moved—shaking, quaking, talking in tongues, ecstatic screaming, foaming at the mouth, jerking with convulsions, rolling about the floor, and swooning weren’t unheard of. Teed didn’t incorporate such flamboyance into his church. But he did take inspiration from the Shakers’ orderly prosperity. Like the Harmonists, the Shakers had created a self-contained, self-sustaining community. Unlike the Perfectionists led by John Humphrey Noyes at Oneida, New York, whose economic success lay primarily in manufacturing—Oneida was built on a better bear trap of their invention and handsome flatware—the Shakers did it mainly through agriculture, plus a few small cottage industries. Teed duly noted this profitable mixture.
Around this time Teed’s parents had relocated to Moravia at the southern tip of one of the lesser Finger Lakes, where they had started a mop-making venture, and invited him to work at it with them, probably hoping to distract him from the arcane religious notions his Baptist father didn’t accept. Teed joined them but continued to pursue his interest in religion. With a small number of followers he established the first of his celibate Koreshan communities. He adopted the name Koreshanity for his beliefs and renamed himself Koresh (Cyrus in Hebrew). Both the mop business and the communal venture in Moravia failed after two years. “He alienated the residents of the town,” according to Howard D. Fine, “and moved his community to Syracuse. There he established the Syracuse Institute of Progressive Medicine. In circumstances similar to those of his earlier move, he and his followers left Syracuse for New York City in the mid-1880s,”42 ahead of charges by Mrs. Charles Cobb that Teed had defrauded her (and her mother) out of a sum of money by claiming he was the new messiah. It seems to have been a case of heated religious enthusiasm burned to cold ashes, but the publicity was enough to force Teed to pack up and leave town, in such pinched financial circumstances that he had to ask his friend Dr. Andrews for a loan to do so. A New York Times account of the Cobb business also said that while in Moravia Teed had encouraged the wife of a liveryman to run off with him, and that that small scandal had made moving to Syracuse seem like a very good idea to him.
In New York City Teed established another modest commune, this time in a third-floor walkup apartment on 135TH Street near Eighth Avenue, where he was living with four women (two being his sister and his cousin). He was forty-six years old and had been the new messiah of the hollow earth for sixteen years, but he was unable to sustain even this little enclave.
Everything changed in 1886. The National Association of Mental Science was holding a convention in Chicago in September, and Teed got an offer to give an address. Once again, an enthusiastic woman was involved. Mrs. Thankful H. Hale, a member of the convention, had heard Teed in New York and urged the organization to bring him to Chicago to speak—all expenses paid by Mrs. Hale. Teed jumped at the chance. His speech was apparently such a barn burner (the text doesn’t survive) that he followed it the next day with one on the brain.
The brain lecture concluded with faith healing, and a woman so fat she could hardly walk made it home on foot. Teed was a hit. He soon moved to Chicago, using the association as a springboard for his many plans and schemes. Soon he had established a metaphysical school called the World College of Life. Its first graduates in June 1887 were fourteen women, who had earned Psychic and Pneumic Therapeutic Doctorates, making them, it seems, Ph.D.s in brain and soul therapy. He also set up the Guiding Star Publishing House to get the word out, beginning the first of a long torrent of Koreshan publi-cations. The monthly Guiding Star (“a magazine devoted to the science of being”) commenced in December 1886. It became the more kinetic Flaming Sword in November 1889. And, of course, he started a church, the Assembly of the Covenant (Church Triumphant). Chief among the church leaders, theoretically coequal with Teed, Mrs. Annie G. Ordway (yet another Mrs.) was named Dual Associate, and later rechristened Victori
a Gratia. Teed had been promised a feminine counterpart during his illumination, and Mrs. Ordway filled the bill. She remained a close associate to Teed until his death—too close, some thought, as she was persistently rumored to be his mistress as well.
Mrs. Annie G. Ordway, Teed’s alter ego and coleader of the Koreshans. (Koreshan State Historic Site)
He had at last begun to attract more followers, most of them women, educated, middle-class, married. It is hard to understand at this distance how he gained any converts to the idea that we’re all living inside the concavity of a hollow earth. Indeed, it is hard to understand why the hollow earth business was such an important part of Teed’s creed in the first place. Possibly the women just thought it an incidental quirk, forgiving this further evidence of male weirdness, focusing instead on his belief in a male/female God, his insistence on equality of the sexes, and a peaceful life of chastity outside the dungeon of marriage. By this time he had also added another appealing promise—his followers would enjoy personal immortality. Possibly, too, it was a certain sexy charisma on Teed’s part. He wasn’t big, about 5’6” and 165 pounds, but he had square-jawed good looks, a deep resonant voice, and an unwavering focus to his eyes usually described as “forceful” and “penetrating.”
By 1888 the number of believers had so grown that he signed a lease on “a large double brick house on the corner of 33rd Place and College [Cottage] Grove Avenue,” where he set up his largest celibate community to date.43 The numbers continued to increase in a modest way, and four years later the core group moved into expanded quarters. By then Teed counted 126 followers in Chicago, nearly three-quarters of them women, almost all living in or near a South Side Washington Heights enclave of eight and a half acres containing a mansion, cottages, beautiful gardens and shady walks, and two ponds big enough for ice skating in the winter. They called the compound Beth-Ophra. An 1894 article in the Chicago Herald described it as “a fine property … surrounded by broad, shady verandas and magnificent grounds thickly studded with old trees and made attractive by grass plats and flower beds. With … [Teed] in the same fine building live some of the prominent angels [of his church]. There are seven cottages besides in which other members of the Koreshan community live, and an office building—formerly a huge barn—in which is the printing office.”44 Today this once peaceful spot lies beneath the Dan Ryan Expressway, thundered over nonstop by trucks pounding along, except during rush hour gridlock.
Eventually Teed began looking around for an unspoiled pastoral place to build a new community from scratch, where his New Jerusalem might arise. And how would he recognize the right place? It would be at “the point where the vitellus of the alchemico-organic cosmos specifically determines,” another of those recondite locutions Teed was so fond of. He also called this special spot “the vitellus of the cosmogenic egg.” By cosmogenic egg he meant the earth, and the more common word for vitellus is yolk—though here he was probably using it in the sense of “embryo.” The yolk is inside the egg, of course, its center. In other words, in Koreshan cosmology, they were seeking to locate their magnificent city at the center of the center, inside the earth.
Teed set off from Chicago in 1893 with an entourage of three women—Mrs. Annie G. Ordway, Mrs. Berthaldine Boomer, and Mrs. Mary C. Mills. They followed an itinerary set by prayer. Robert Lynn Rainard says that “each night the group sought in devotions guidance for the following day’s journey. Spiritual direction ‘guided’ them into Florida and to their ultimate destination.”45 In January 1894, they found themselves in Punta Rassa on the southwest coast, a few miles west of Fort Myers at the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River. Today the peninsula is occupied by the Sanibel Harbour Resort and Spa near the causeway to toney Sanibel Island. Punta Rassa was a former cattle shipping town that had died after the Civil War, reborn in the 1880s as a sportfishing resort for the wealthy, complete with its own fancy hotel, the Tarpon House Inn. Teed and his attractive spiritual helpmeets were stopping there when they had a momentous encounter. Rainard says:
At Punta Rassa the Koreshans met an elderly German named Gustav Damkohler, and his son Elwin, who were on their way back from their Christmas visit to Fort Myers. Teed engaged Damkohler in conversation which led to the Koreshans being invited to visit Damkohler’s homestead at the Estero River, twenty miles down the coast from Punta Rassa. Damkohler, who had been a Florida pioneer since the early 1880s, had lost his wife in child-birth, and all but one child to the treacheries of pioneer life. A man in need of companionship, Damkohler was receptive to the fellowship of the Koreshans and the pampering of their women. At Estero Dr. Teed came to the realization that he had been directed to the remote Florida wilderness by the Divine Being.
The Koreshan Story, a more “official” account, though not necessarily a more accurate one, has this fortuitous meeting taking place differently. According to it, a prospective seller had sent Teed train tickets to inspect a property on Pine Island, Florida, just north of Punta Rassa, and in December 1893 he and the three women went to check it out. It proved prohibitively expensive, but while in Punta Gorda, Teed had taken the opportunity to give a few lectures and distribute a few pounds of Koreshan pamphlets, and some of this literature found its way to Damkohler, who wrote a letter to Teed—in German, sent in a Watch Tower Society envelope covered with biblical quotes. The Koreshan Story has it, “as Victoria Gratia (Annie Ordway) held the letter (unopened) she seemed to know that it would lead them back to Florida that winter to the right place to begin.” Back in Florida in January 1894, the momentous meeting took place in Punta Rassa. Teed lit right into expounding his doctrines, and Damkohler soaked it all in like a sponge: “Tears of joy rolled down the man’s cheek, and he exclaimed repeatedly, ‘Master! Master! The Lord is in it!’ He then besought them to come with him and see the land he had held for the Master.”
This early view of the Estero River facing east reveals the wild tranquility of the setting Teed selected for his New Jerusalem. The roof in the middle distance belongs to Damkohler’s original cottage. (Koreshan State Historic Site)
Except for their mutual religious fervor, Damkohler and Teed were a study in contrasts. Teed, sleek, meticulously groomed, given to custom-tailored suits, cultured, sophisticated, silver-tongued. And Damkohler, an aging swamp rat, though a handsome one, with forceful features, silvery hair, and an abundant white beard, lacking sight in one eye, more at home speaking German than his halting English.
Damkohler wanted them to see his land right away. They set out down the coast in a borrowed sailboat. At Mound Key they stopped for supper around a fire. Navigating through coastal mangrove thickets, they used two rowboats to make their way up the small sinuous Estero River, captivated by the wild serene beauty of the place, its solemn stillness, sand pines and cabbage palms rising more than forty feet above the placid coffee-colored river, alligators snoozing on the banks, the occasional bright chirp and chatter of tropical birds. They reached Damkohler’s little landing around ten o’clock at night on New Year’s Day 1894. The circumstances were rather more spartan than Teed was accustomed to. The only building was Damkohler’s one-room board cabin, where all camped out. As The Koreshan Story describes their arrangements,
The cabin also had a front and back porch, but furnishings were scant. They sat on boxes to eat their meals from a broad shelf built into the back porch. The chief bed was in the cabin’s living room and was assigned to the three sisters. The ladies lay cross-wise with the tall Victoria’s feet resting on boxes along side the bed. Dr. Teed, Mr. Damkohler and the boy slept on cots and piles of old sails on the floor of the attic. This old cabin still stands in Estero today…. Dr. Teed busied himself grubbing and clearing land, while the women were occupied with improving the cabin, preparing meals and other activities about the place. For food and supplies they were obliged to row and sail to Pine Island. The river provided fish and Damkohler’s beehives produced excellent honey.
It sounds like a pleasant idyll. Teed remained three weeks befo
re returning to Chicago, possibly because Damkohler needed additional convincing when it came to turning over the land. Damkohler seems to have been ready to give the Koreshans half his 320 acres, but Teed was urging him to deed over the other half as well—for a token price of one dollar. Thrifty German Damkohler wasn’t so sure about that, but in the end he gave in. The deal they finally struck was $200 for three hundred acres, with Damkohler holding on to twenty for himself. He would later have second thoughts.
The women stayed on—their company no doubt added inducement to Damkohler—while Teed took the train back to Chicago to put together a group of recruits. A few weeks later twenty-four Koreshans arrived from Chicago and began constructing a two-story L-shaped log building with a thatched roof (known as the Brothers House) as a temporary shelter while they built the first of the community’s permanent buildings. They also put up white canvas “tent-houses” beneath groves of live oaks, with overhangs to create shady front porches with raised wooden floors and decorated with cheery trailers of flowering plants; they were big enough for a few wicker rockers and canvas deck chairs—quite inviting looking in the surviving photographs.
Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio Page 15
