Marion Hammon

Marion Hammon was a prominent bishop in Colorado City’s fundamentalist community. His significance in the account lies in the 1986 succession dispute after LeRoy Johnson’s death: Hammon’s followers challenged Rulon Jeffs’s claim to leadership, and their departure divided the community into rival congregations.

Position in the Community

Hammon is identified as a prominent bishop whose supporters remained loyal to him when Rulon Jeffs assumed leadership after LeRoy Johnson died in 1986. The succession was contested, and the disagreement became a community-wide fracture rather than a dispute confined to its leaders.

The Split and the Second Ward

Nearly a third of the community left with Hammon’s followers. They moved onto a stretch of desert just across the highway and founded a separate fundamentalist church known as the Second Ward. The original congregation was called the First Ward. The account gives no further details about Hammon’s personal life or his role in governing the new congregation.

Continuing Division

The rival congregations denounced one another as apostates and warned that the other group faced eternal damnation. The split did not quickly resolve: the book describes the hostility and separation as continuing at the time of its account. Hammon’s role thus marks a major rupture in Colorado City, where a contested claim to prophetic succession divided a substantial part of the community.