Frank Sandford - The Scattering

The Scattering

During his imprisonment, Sandford tried to promote his teenage son John as a Shiloh leader, and John seems to have had some success at editing a new periodical, The Golden Trumpet. But when in 1915, John was put in charge of an inquisitorial board called the "Eye-of-the-Needle," intended to probe the souls of Shiloh residents, Sandford himself brought the experiment to a halt when his son incurred resentment and, in any case, proved temperamentally unsuited to the task. Shortly thereafter, Marguerite, one of Sandford's daughters, ran away from the community, a serious blow to Sandford's authority because of his insistence that leaders be able to "handle their children."

Given three years off for good behavior, Sandford was released from prison in September 1918. When he reappeared at Shiloh, he was served a sumptuous meal, although many Shiloh residents had recently suffered serious illness and almost all, hunger. Sandford's return to Shiloh sparked new contributions and new healings, even food enough for two meals a day.

Nevertheless, three days after his arrival, another of Sandford's daughters ran away, and a few months later Sandford left Maine for the sect's Boston headquarters. Furthermore, the sect had conducted virtually no evangelistic outreach since the beginning of Sandford's imprisonment in 1911.

The end of the Shiloh community came suddenly in 1920 after the death of Shiloh resident Elma Hastings and a suit brought by relatives for guardianship of her children on the grounds of non-support by their father. Then the Children's Protective Society of Maine, having investigated living conditions at Shiloh, urged that all minors be removed from the community.

In March 1920, Sandford sent the message, "Work." No one anticipated that this directive would effectively end the Shiloh community within days. Two months later the prayer vigils had stopped, the Bible school was closed, and the Shiloh population had dropped from 370 to a handful. As Nelson has written, once the men went off to the mills, everything changed. With "the assurance that they would never be hungry again," that their needs would be met in the same way everyone else's were met, "there was no reason to stay. They could be ordinary Christians anywhere."