Annie Vandeveer Blackmore

Annie Vandeveer Blackmore was Kenyon Blackmore’s first wife and the mother of their seven children. She entered their marriage as a young woman with little knowledge of polygamy; decades later, she discovered that Kenyon had taken another wife without telling her. Her efforts to keep the marriage together unfolded within a community where men’s pursuit of plural wives could be defended as religious practice, while wives bore the consequences in their family lives.

Identity and Background

Annie grew up on a ranch outside Winnipeg, Manitoba, with her twin sister. In 1956, the two appeared as seventeen-year-old cowgirls on the cover of Canada’s Weekend Magazine. Kenyon, then twenty and an avid horseman from a family known for polygamy in western Canada, saw the cover and decided he wanted to marry one of the twins. He wrote to the sisters while away on a mission in South Africa, continued corresponding during his absence, and visited them after returning.

Annie and Kenyon married in December 1959. Their daughter Lena was born nine months later, and the couple moved to Provo, Utah, so Kenyon could attend Brigham Young University. Annie had converted to Mormonism after meeting him, but his relatives’ plural marriages had meant little to her before their wedding. Her later resistance to polygamy was therefore not simply a dispute within a system she had knowingly accepted: it came as Kenyon began pressing for plural wives after the couple had established a family.

Marriage and the Pressure for Plural Wives

In 1966, Kenyon took a teaching job in Bountiful, British Columbia. There, he began advocating for plural marriage. Annie tried to approach the issue with an open mind, but could not accept it. Her refusal did not end Kenyon’s pursuit of another wife. He openly sought Alaire, the adopted daughter of his uncle Ray Blackmore, who was Bountiful’s presiding bishop. Because Kenyon’s advances had not been authorized by the local bishop or the prophet in Colorado City, Ray ordered his sons to drive Kenyon out of town. Alaire was subsequently married to Ray, her adoptive father.

This episode locates Annie’s domestic conflict within a wider structure of authority over marriage. In Bountiful, family relationships could be rearranged through the decisions of male leaders, and even the kinship ties surrounding Alaire became difficult to distinguish: she was Kenyon’s intended plural wife, Ray’s adopted daughter, and ultimately his wife. Annie’s refusal, by contrast, did not give her control over Kenyon’s choices. She remained married to him as he continued to pursue a life organized around his own decisions.

Years of Instability and Separation

For roughly the next fifteen years, Kenyon moved his growing family around western North America. He worked variously as a ranch hand, leather worker, and carpenter, and the family rarely stayed in one place for longer than a year or two. Annie came to understand that she and the children were not central to his priorities. He would leave for weeks without calling or telling her where he had gone. Their material uncertainty was accompanied by the uncertainty of not knowing what he was doing or when he would return.

Their daughter Lena later described Kenyon as a cruel and self-centered father. She recalled that he was physically abusive to the children and particularly harsh toward her. When Lena was eleven and the family was living in Las Cruces, New Mexico, he beat her with a tractor fan belt; she said the scars remained on the backs of her legs. This account shows that Annie’s struggle to hold the family together existed alongside the harm Kenyon inflicted on their children, rather than being only a disagreement about plural marriage.

In the early 1980s, the family moved to Salem, Utah, where Kenyon partnered with Bernard Brady. The two sold shares in tax-sheltered financial trusts and invested in the Dream Mine. Millions of dollars flowed into their business account, but the venture collapsed. Annie’s mother-in-law, Lavina Stubbs LeBaron, lost the proceeds from selling her home and other property in Kenyon’s program. When Brady was prosecuted and imprisoned, Kenyon went into hiding in Mexico, where Gwendolyn LeBaron and Lavina sheltered him.

The Secret Marriage and Its Discovery

At that point, Annie still did not know that Kenyon had married Gwendolyn. She had been his wife for twenty-four years. She learned of the second marriage only after traveling to Mexico to persuade him to return to Utah. There she discovered that Gwendolyn was about the same age as Lena and had recently given birth to a daughter, Evangeline, by Kenyon. The discovery made visible what had been concealed from Annie: Kenyon had created another household while leaving his first wife unaware.

Annie returned to Utah alone, shocked but unwilling to abandon the marriage. In January 1985, she went back to Mexico and again asked Kenyon to come home. This time he agreed. Yet as soon as he crossed the border into El Paso, Texas, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrested him. An investor who had been swindled by Kenyon had alerted authorities. Kenyon entered a plea agreement and was imprisoned in Tallahassee, Florida. Annie’s attempt to bring him back thus ended not in a resumed shared life but in his arrest and incarceration.

Later Separation and Significance

Kenyon was released in late 1991 and returned to Cardston, Alberta. By then Annie had given up on the marriage and filed for divorce. Kenyon tried to reconnect with Lena, but Lena was uncomfortable around Gwendolyn and the children she had with him. She objected to the way they were being raised and later became angry when Kenyon took her truck after promising to make its payments and insure it. He failed to do so, and the resulting contact with authorities led him to flee again to Mexico with Gwendolyn and their children. Annie’s account ends with the marriage already broken in practice and with Kenyon’s separate household continuing beyond her reach.

Annie’s history is not a story of a single decisive break. It is a sequence of accommodations and reversals: a marriage entered without understanding what polygamy would mean, an attempt to consider it, a refusal, years of moves and absences, and repeated efforts to bring Kenyon back even after his second marriage had been kept from her. The contrast between Annie’s commitment to the marriage and Kenyon’s unilateral choices makes the unequal distribution of agency concrete. Her experience also sits within a wider fundamentalist setting in which women could be assigned marriage roles at a young age and leaders claimed authority over families. The evidence does not make Annie a leader or a theorist of that system; it shows, more plainly, the personal costs of living under its expectations while trying to preserve a family.