Colonia LeBaron is a settlement in Mexico established by Dayer LeBaron in 1944 on mesquite-covered desert about thirty-five miles outside Colonia Juárez. Founded after Dayer said he received a revelation commanding him to buy the land, it became the base of his expanding fundamentalist sect. Decades later, it served as a refuge for Kenyon Blackmore when he fled fraud indictments, and as the place where his second wife gave birth to their daughter while his first wife remained unaware of the marriage.

Founding and Setting

The settlement emerged within a longer history of Mormon migration to Mexico. In 1886, polygamous Saints had purchased fifty thousand acres along the Rio Piedras Verdes, about 150 miles southwest of El Paso, to escape federal efforts to prosecute plural marriage. By the time the first members of the LeBaron family moved south in 1902, some 3,500 Mormons lived near Colonia Juárez, at the foot of the Sierra Madre Occidental.

In 1944, Dayer LeBaron received what he understood as a divine command to acquire a tract of desert roughly thirty-five miles from Colonia Juárez. He cleared the mesquite-covered land, planted beans, and named the settlement Colonia LeBaron. It soon became the center of operations for the fundamentalist sect he was building. The account establishes its origins through a practical sequence—purchase, clearing, cultivation, naming—set within a religious claim of revelation.

A Community Shaped by Religious Migration

Colonia LeBaron’s early history was connected to disputes over religious authority and marriage. Lavina Stubbs moved there from Short Creek in 1958, after her father fell out with LeRoy Johnson, converted to the LeBaron group, and relocated his family to Mexico. The Stubbs family had held a prestigious place in Short Creek, but the move carried Lavina into a different fundamentalist community and a new household structure.

A year after arriving, at sixteen, Lavina became a plural wife of Joel LeBaron. She later recalled fourteen joyful years of marriage to him and contrasted that outcome with the marriage her mother had feared she would be forced into before the family left Short Creek. Her account makes the settlement a destination for a family escaping one leader’s authority and entering another community organized around a prophet’s command.

Refuge and Family Conflict

In 1983, a federal grand jury indicted Kenyon Blackmore, Bernard Brady, and nineteen other partners on multiple fraud charges involving more than $32 million from 3,800 investors. Brady was arrested and later imprisoned; Blackmore went into hiding in Mexico, where Gwendolyn Blackmore and her mother, Lavina, sheltered him at Colonia LeBaron. The settlement thus became a refuge from law enforcement as well as a center of religious life.

While Blackmore was there, his first wife, Annie, still did not know that he had married Gwendolyn. Annie discovered the second marriage only after traveling to Mexico to persuade him to return to Utah. She also learned that Gwendolyn, then the same age as Annie and Kenyon’s oldest daughter, had given birth to their daughter, Evangeline, at Colonia LeBaron. The child was born exactly three days before Dan Lafferty murdered Brenda and Erica Lafferty in American Fork.

Annie returned to Mexico in January 1985 and persuaded Kenyon to come back with her. But as soon as he crossed the border into El Paso, FBI agents arrested him; a brother-in-law who had lost money in the fraud had alerted them. Colonia LeBaron’s role in this episode was brief but consequential: it sheltered Blackmore during his flight, held the concealed second household that Annie discovered, and became the point from which his return ended in arrest.