John Y. Barlow

John Y. Barlow was a staunch plural-marriage advocate who led the Mormon Fundamentalist movement in the mid-1930s and helped make Short Creek a center for families committed to the Work. His ties to the settlement and his designation of LeRoy Johnson as his intended successor shaped the movement’s leadership and fed the dispute that divided it after Barlow’s death.

Position and ties to Short Creek

Barlow lived in northern Utah, but he cultivated a close relationship with Short Creek after learning that it had become a magnet for families devoted to the Work. He developed a particularly close association with LeRoy Johnson, whose family had moved from Lee’s Ferry to Short Creek in 1928 as improved access brought more outsiders through the former settlement. In 1940, Barlow moved some of his own families to Short Creek, strengthening the community’s connections to the wider fundamentalist movement. One of his daughters later married Johnson.

Barlow’s family connections also reached into later generations of the community. DeLoy Bateman was his grandson, and another descendant, Dan Barlow, became mayor of Colorado City. These links place Barlow not only in the movement’s leadership history but within the kinship networks that continued to shape its communities.

Authority and succession

In the account favored by residents of Colorado City and Bountiful, Barlow appears in a framed montage of eight religious leaders whose portraits hang in local homes. The sequence runs from Joseph Smith through Brigham Young, John Taylor, John W. Woolley, Lorin C. Woolley, and Barlow to Johnson and Rulon Jeffs. Followers understood the leaders to have received the keys of priesthood authority in succession. This lineage was not accepted uniformly across Mormon Fundamentalism: other communities honored somewhat different prophetic lineages.

Before Barlow died in 1949, he specified that Johnson should succeed him. Leadership instead passed to Joseph Musser, a respected acolyte. When Musser suffered disabling strokes, he became dependent on the care of Rulon Allred, a naturopath and fellow plural-marriage advocate. In 1951, Musser appointed Allred his second elder and heir apparent. Those who believed Johnson should inherit the leadership, in accordance with Barlow’s direction, strongly objected.

Schism and legacy

The rivalry between Johnson’s supporters and Allred’s camp became severe enough to split the fundamentalist movement. After Musser died in 1954, Johnson led the larger group, which remained in Short Creek and became known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or the United Effort Plan. Allred led the rival Apostolic United Brethren in the Salt Lake Valley.

Barlow’s historical importance therefore lies both in the network he built around Short Creek and in the succession claim attached to his name. His choice of Johnson became a point of reference in a contest over who could legitimately inherit religious authority. The resulting division also shows that appeals to a shared line of prophetic succession did not settle leadership disputes: communities could preserve the language of inherited priesthood keys while arriving at competing claims about who possessed them.