The Ranch is a mystery to those in neighboring towns, but is considered Zion to the about 400 polygamists who live there

After church, Flint Laub, his two wives and their 10 children sat down at the kitchen table to eat pizza.

The lunch was served in the big house, where Michelle Laub, 32, and her seven children live. Flint’s second wife is Ruth Anne Laub, who is 25 and Michelle’s half-sister. She recently gave birth to her third child. Ruth Anne Laub and her kids live in a second house a few steps away from the big one.

The Laubs live in a polygamous community of perhaps 400 people in rural Missouri between the towns of Humansville and Stockton. The residents call it “the Ranch”, though the agriculture is limited to a hay field and a few cows and chickens. People in the neighboring towns refer to the community as “the Compound”, but you won’t see any high walls or armed guards — just brown dirt roads winding through clusters of trees and homes.

Inside the big house, the adults laughed about what outsiders think of them. Flint, 40, runs a roofing company. If someone asks him if he’s a polygamist, he will say yes. Sometimes people will ask if the Compound is really prepped for warfare, assuming they are survivalists (they’re not). Ruth Anne, who has worked as a first responder in Stockton, says one day someone asked her if she believed in air conditioning. Yes, she said. Her house is modern; constructed from concrete poured into plastic foam.

“It probably bothers me that people think that’s who we are,” Ruth Anne said, “but it’s funny, too.”

“If I was raised outside the religion,” Flint said, “and heard about people with multiple wives, I would think that’s pretty crazy, too.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In the polygamous community that residents call the Ranch, members gather for Sunday morning church service. Photograph: Liv Paggiarino/The Guardian

In God’s eyes

“I believe Missouri is the promised land,” said Sean Anderson, a 51-year-old fundamentalist Mormon from Mexico who has also lived in Arizona and Utah. He recently moved to The Ranch with his wife and their six children.

The residents are a hodgepodge of people whose members in Utah haven’t always gotten along. But here, the polygamists worship not only with each other, but also with the Mormon church, also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which officially abandoned polygamy in 1890 and excommunicates members found practicing it.

Despite their differences, the mainstream Latter-day Saints and people on The Ranch still share core beliefs, and the community still uses its texts. This week, Seth Laub, an elder in the congregation, gave a lesson from the Book of Mormon. “Nothing is hopeless in God’s eyes,” Seth told worshippers.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded in 1830 by a then-24-year-old Vermont-born Joseph Smith. To this day, anyone considering themselves to be a Latter-day Saint still reveres Smith. Fundamentalist Mormons, the ones who are not part of the mainstream church, and often practice polygamy, believe in following his original teachings, including a revelation Smith said he received three times between 1834 and 1842: Smith told associates that an angel appeared to him and told him to practice plural marriage. Historians believe Smith married his first plural wife in Kirtland, Ohio, in the mid-1830s. Smith died in 1844.

Today, some fundamentalist Mormon polygamists believe plural marriage is necessary to reach the highest level of heaven. Others practice polygamy simply to follow Smith’s teachings. These polygamists tend to believe in big families: women often give birth to 10 or more children. While some of the polygamist leaders have been known to have 20 or more wives, most men have two or three.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A religious text lies open on a chair during a Sunday church service at The Ranch. Photograph: Liv Paggiarino/The Guardian

A voice on the mountain

The idea of The Ranch emerged on 7 November 1983, when Stephen Laub was at his home in Motoqua, an enclave in south-west Utah for members of a polygamous church called the Apostolic United Brethren, or AUB.

He was in the cellar, stocking and preparing it to ride out an apocalypse at the end of the millennium, when he heard someone call his name.

He went to his wives to ask what they wanted. They said they didn’t call him and didn’t hear a voice.

He heard the voice over eight days. Eventually, he tracked the voice to a nearby mountain. He started hiking. The voice had more instructions as he hiked farther up the mountain.

As he recorded in his journal: “The Lord told me he wants me to go to Missouri and buy a farm.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sean Anderson, a 51-year-old fundamentalist Mormon from Mexico, recently moved to the Ranch with his wife and their six children. Photograph: Liv Paggiarino/The Guardian

For Mormons of all stripes, Missouri – specifically Jackson county – is a landmark. Mormons began arriving there in 1831 and that year, Smith had a prophecy that Zion was in Jackson county and that Jesus would return there one day.

But Latter-day Saints had conflicts with other Missouri settlers over land, commerce and governance and by 1838, violence got so bad modern textbooks call it the Missouri Mormon wwar. The ugliest episode happened that year, when 17 Latter-day Saints and one sympathizer were massacred at a place called Haun’s Mill. Latter-day Saints soon began leaving the state.

When Laub hiked down from the mountain and arrived home, his brother Derril Laub and another resident, Bruce Compton, were there to help him with the cellar. He told them they needed to go to Missouri. Because Latter-day Saints believe their movement started with a revelation from God, no one challenged him.

They did ask where in Missouri they were supposed to go. To provide them with an answer, Stephen Laub hiked back up the mountain to seek a clarification. God told him to go about 100 miles south of Independence.

The next day, the Laub brothers, some of their sons, Compton and another resident named Kent Andra loaded into a blue pickup truck and began driving east.

“The idea was to build the kingdom of God, establish Zion,” Compton, now 76, said in a recent interview.

The men stopped in St George, Utah to make a phone call. It was to the president of their church, Owen Allred, in Salt Lake City. Stephen conveyed his plan.

Allred didn’t like it. After being driven from Missouri, the early leaders of the Latter-day Saints issued prophecies saying God’s wrath would be visited upon western Missouri. While some Mormons believe the burned towns and bloodshed western Missouri suffered during the American Civil War fulfilled the prophecy and wiped the slate clean, Allred was among those who thought Missouri still had it coming.

He told Stephen to go look at Missouri, but not to buy anything.

The truck stopped in Fort Scott, Kansas, just across the state line from Missouri. The men went into a real estate office, where one of the men saw a pamphlet advertising 600 acres between the Missouri towns of Stockton and Humansville.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bruce Compton helped found the Mormon compound in Humansville in 1983. Photograph: Liv Paggiarino/The Guardian

It was a wooded, undeveloped property on one of the Ozark mountains’ massive plateaus. The men drove to the 600 acres to inspect it. They had found their place.

The men negotiated a purchase price of $300 an acre and paid $3,000 earnest money. They promised to make a down payment of $34,000 within 30 days. That was money the men didn’t have when they made the agreement. Other believers back in Utah chipped in, and the financing of the property has become part of its mythology — proof that God wanted the believers to be in southwest Missouri.

The group contributions were also the first example of ranch residents practicing what’s called a United Order, a fundamentalist Mormon form of communal living where followers give money, entire pieces of property or time and talents to benefit the community.

A unique spot

At a coffee shop in Stockton, Missouri, on a blustery November day, Anderson explained what he liked about living out at the Ranch.

He’s a two-hour drive from Jackson county for the day Christ returns; he also likes that he can have discussions of Mormon doctrine with other residents without fear of offending someone. “They may not agree with me,” Anderson said, “and they aren’t going to ostracize me.”

That makes the Ranch a unique spot. Even though Mormon polygamists all trace their beliefs to the same place, they have had disagreements. The groups have tended to isolate themselves within specific neighborhoods in metropolitan Salt Lake City or locations in the Utah or Arizona deserts.

While most of the disputes have been peaceful, the most infamous episodes happened in the 1970s when a polygamist named Ervil LeBaron ordered the murders of rival polygamous leaders and others who he thought offended God. One of the victims in 1977 was Rulon Allred, who founded the AUB. He was shot to death in his chiropractic clinic in Salt Lake City.

Today some of LeBaron and Allred’s relations live among the polygamists near Humansville. The Ranch has residents who hail from at least three distinct polygamous sects, plus what are known as independents. Those are people with fundamentalist Mormon beliefs who do not affiliate with a church.

Anderson would qualify as one of those. He was born in Mexico to a Mexican mother and American father. Anderson developed a belief in fundamental Mormonism. He had two wives for a time, but those marriages dissolved.

He and his current wife, Clara Anderson, moved to the Ranch in the fall with their six children. Clara, 39, is one of Rulon Allred’s great-granddaughters.

Within their household, the Andersons admit the roles are traditional. Sean works in construction and is a part owner of a barbecue restaurant while his wife stays home.

“I stay home with my kids because I want to stay home with my kids,” she said. “It’s not because Sean told me to stay home.”

Women from the Ranch are weary of the public perception of wives in polygamy as trapped inside a home. Some women hold jobs in the surrounding communities and some don’t.

A review of marriage licenses in south-west Missouri shows most residents of the polygamous community marry in their 20s, though a few brides and grooms have been as young as 17. In Mormon polygamy, the husband usually has one legal wife; subsequent marriages are ordained in a religious service, but there’s no license on file with any county clerk.

In Missouri, you can be convicted of bigamy if a married person “purports”, to quote the statute, to marry another person. The offense is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. That’s a lesser punishment than, say, Utah, where polygamy is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison or 15 years if it’s committed in conjunction with a fraud or violent offense.

Cedar county prosecutor Ty Gaither, one of the locals who refer to the polygamous community as The Compound, said he has not received any complaints about crimes there. He points out his county is home to multiple religious communities, including Amish and Mennonite.

“Let’s put it this way,” Gaither said of a plural marriage, “if I had three parties who were consenting adults, I wouldn’t have a complaining witness. If I had a complaining witness, we would take a look.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A string of mailboxes lines one of the many private roads on the Ranch. Photograph: Liv Paggiarino/The Guardian

Those who left

As they finished lunch, Flint, Michelle and Ruth Anne Laub talked more about some of the perceptions people have of their family.

Over the years, some have asked if the community has a relationship to Warren Jeffs, the president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who is serving a sentence of life plus 20 years in prison for crimes related to sexually abusing two girls he married as plural wives. (The answer is no; there are no known Jeffs followers at the Ranch.)

The spouses also discussed the changes they have seen in the community. The AUB leaders in Utah were never pleased with those who moved to Missouri and as a result, the two communities have had little relationship in the last 35 years.

People have come and gone over the years. Compton, one of those Motoqua men who drove to Missouri in the blue pickup truck, didn’t find everything he was looking for on those 600 acres that was supposed to be Zion.

Compton says living in a plural marriage and a united order gave him a lot of questions and not enough answers about God. Before he moved to Missouri, Compton came across a book about Jewish Kabbalah during a work trip to California.

Kabbalah is meant to explain the relationship between God and the universe. Compton developed an interest in metaphysics. The other Motoqua men didn’t like it. They believed metaphysics conflicted with their fundamentalist Mormon beliefs. They eventually asked Compton to leave.

Compton separated from his plural wives, remarried to just one woman, and now leads a church in nearby Buffalo, Missouri, where he preaches a belief in an almighty creator. He’ll teach from the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Torah, the Qur’an or any other text promoting monotheism.

“I search for truth,” Compton said.

You can also buy a psychic reading from Compton and his wife, Connie Compton. The client will share certain information that Bruce relays to Connie. Through a trance, she will give advice or tell the client the cause of any physical or emotional ailments.

As for what’s next at what people call either the Compound or the Ranch, the residents years ago poured a concrete foundation for a temple against a small slope near the center of the community.

No one seems to know when the rest of the temple will be constructed, or whether it will take the impetus of the residents or direction from God.

• This piece was co-published with the Salt Lake Tribune.