Dayer LeBaron

Dayer LeBaron was a Mormon fundamentalist leader whose religious authority took practical form in a settlement: in 1944, he said he received a revelation commanding him to purchase desert land in Mexico, clear it, and establish a new community. The resulting Colonia LeBaron became the operating base of his expanding sect and a lasting center of his family’s religious movement.

Identity and Religious Setting

Dayer was the father of Joel LeBaron and Ervil LeBaron and one of the principal figures in a movement that rejected the mainstream church’s abandonment of plural marriage. Mormon fundamentalists understood themselves as preserving religious principles the institutional church had relinquished after the 1890 Manifesto. Their competing claims to priesthood authority and divine direction made new revelations a source not only of legitimacy, but also of division.

The book places Dayer’s sect within a broader landscape of small fundamentalist communities and rival prophetic leaders. The movement’s branches did not share one uncontested succession: leaders and followers could recognize different prophets and different lines of authority. Dayer’s establishment of a separate community in Mexico gave his own family’s branch a territorial base within that fractured religious world.

The Founding of Colonia LeBaron

In 1944, Dayer received a revelation directing him to buy a mesquite-covered tract of desert roughly thirty-five miles outside Colonia Juárez. He cleared the land, planted beans, and named the settlement Colonia LeBaron. The sequence joined spiritual claim to material work: the revelation specified a place, and clearing and cultivating the land turned that instruction into a functioning settlement.

Colonia LeBaron soon served as the base of operations for Dayer’s growing sect. The settlement was therefore more than a family residence: it gave the movement a distinct community in which to organize and sustain itself. Its location in Mexico also connected it to an established Mormon presence in the region, including communities formed by Saints who had moved south to escape legal action against plural marriage in Utah.

Alliances and Conflict

Dayer’s group had at one time maintained a loose association with Rulon Allred’s fundamentalist organization. That relationship had a concrete consequence after Allred was convicted of polygamy in Utah in 1947 and violated parole: members of the LeBaron group gave him refuge in Mexico for a period. The episode shows that the separate communities were not wholly isolated; ties between them could provide practical support even amid competing claims to religious leadership.

The association did not erase the movement’s divisions. Mormon fundamentalist groups developed distinct leadership lines, and disputes over who possessed prophetic authority could harden into lasting rivalries. Dayer’s sect was one such branch, rooted in the community he had founded and connected to, but not interchangeable with, other fundamentalist organizations.

Family and Prophetic Legacy

Dayer had seven sons. In later years, three of them each claimed, at one time or another, to be the one mighty and strong—a figure understood by claimants as a divinely appointed prophet who would restore the church to the path it had abandoned after the 1890 Manifesto. The claims carried forward the movement’s restorationist ambition while multiplying its centers of authority.

Among Dayer’s sons, Joel and Ervil emerged as guiding figures in the 1960s. Their prominence placed the family at the center of a succession of prophetic claims rather than leaving Dayer’s authority as the movement’s final word. The account establishes Dayer’s founding role and the later prominence of his sons, but does not describe his own later life or specify the full course of his leadership.

Significance

Dayer’s importance lies in the way he joined revelation, settlement, and family succession. A claimed divine command became a cultivated community in Mexico; that community supported an expanding sect and helped sustain relationships with other fundamentalist groups. His sons’ later prophetic claims reveal the paradox of a movement committed to restoring a single righteous order: the assertion of direct divine authority could also generate new leaders and further divisions.