When a splinter group of Mormon fundamentalists founded the town of Pinesdale more than 60 years ago, the hundreds of acres in the Bitterroot Valley were seen as a secluded haven, a place where its followers could live communally and practice polygamy without interference from the predominant church in Utah or the laws of Montana.
Over time, those followers built their homes, their school and their church, all on land owned by the breakaway group, the Utah-based Apostolic United Brethren. The expectation was that the members’ tithing and energy would benefit the church and the community.
AUB and other fundamentalist Mormon groups have similarly seeded numerous communities throughout the Western United States and Mexico. Today, according to the latest census, 883 people live in the town of Pinesdale.
For more than a decade, though, and amidst allegations of child molestation leveled against an AUB leader, some of those residents have sought to separate themselves from the church. Perhaps most critically, they want to own the land under their homes, the Montana Free Press reports.
AUB — made noteworthy in recent years by the popular reality TV show, “Sister Wives” — isn’t budging. It paid the taxes all these years, it maintains, and continues to own the land. A Montana judge has been asked to sort out the peculiar circumstances. The Pinesdale residents suing AUB say their livelihoods and freedom are at stake.
Pinesdale has long been viewed as an outlier in Ravalli County in western Montana, and its curious founding is a source of difficulty facing the residents who have sought to separate themselves from AUB. They claim that the “Law of Consecration,” a collectivist Mormon doctrine from the 1830s that encourages communalism through the sharing of resources, includes a provision that promises eventual ownership of each family’s personal space.
“This is a community where we want to help each other and work together,” said Peggy Lynch, who moved to Pinesdale in 1972 but is now one of the residents suing AUB.
She said the community members built the roads, the school and the store, and did so for their collective well-being. She asserts that, although members built their homes on church land, ownership of individual lots is the piece of the pie that is now owed to them.
In the 1980s, much of the land in Pinesdale was transferred to the ownership of Unified Industries (UI), the for-profit arm of AUB. Meanwhile, the town adopted a charter and became the only municipality in Montana that operates with a “town meeting” form of government. Essentially, the residents gather and vote on town affairs. Pinesdale is largely residential, with one store, a school, a church and several private businesses, most of which are on land owned by UI/AUB.
This arrangement means that taxes are paid in two parts — residents are taxed directly on their homes, while taxes on the land are paid through a local UI/AUB bank account, which the plaintiffs contend is filled by the community’s tithed dollars.
That compact over the community held until 2014 when the adult daughter and two nieces of AUB leader Lynn Thompson alleged that he had molested them as children. Increasingly disdainful and mistrusting of the AUB, some Pinesdale residents at that point chose to separate themselves and resolved to take legal possession of the land beneath their homes.
The light just went on in 2014,” said Joan Mell, an attorney representing the community members suing AUB. “They just realized that they were bamboozled and swindled. And then they started looking at the money and realizing how much AUB gains. I mean, it’s millions of dollars. Millions.”
While 27 named plaintiffs are suing AUB, Mell said many others in the community, perhaps as many as a third, support the lawsuit — and their efforts to break away from the church.
The legal question, Mell explained, lies somewhere between church doctrine and the rights of ownership. Her clients believe that the Laws of Consecration — as promised by Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism — make them the rightful owners of the land their homes were built upon. Possession, Mell said, is “a more favorable legal premise to land ownership.”
AUB, on the other hand, is “clinging to the premise that possessors can’t own land unless they pay the taxes,” said Mell, who also represents Sen. Jason Ellsworth, R-Hamilton, the former Montana Senate leader battling allegations of official misconduct.
In 2017, AUB representatives wrote several letters to Pinesdale residents, expressing its intention to subdivide the land and allow people to purchase their lots for $18,000. Lawsuits and counter-lawsuits ensued. AUB now claims that it will move no further on the subdivision while the legal issues are pending, and it vows to add its legal costs to the ultimate price tag for the lots.
Peggy Lynch said AUB stopped the subdivision process because “they don’t want to give us our land anymore.” Lynn Thompson, who denied the molestation allegations against him, died in 2021, and Lynch contends that current AUB head Dave Watson “has decided that he wants to keep ‘The Ranch’ together in remembrance of the founders.”
Stephen Stoker, one of the resident plaintiffs, suspects AUB stalled the subdivision process because “they want to charge fair-market value” for the lots, something that would likely fetch far more than $18,000.
“This is strictly opinion,” he offered about AUB: “They’re greedy bastards.”
Dave Watson and Tom Allsop, the AUB representative in Pinesdale, declined to be interviewed for this article. Their legal stance, as put forth by the Missoula-based law firm Worden Thane P.C., is that there is no clear connection between the money tithed and the property taxes paid.
“The Defendants cannot claim that the circumstances of tithing now give them the right to take the gift of tithing money back in the form of real property,” the lawyers for AUB maintained in court documents. “The Defendants cannot even establish that any of their money went toward these properties, much less that the gift can now be revoked. The real property is also worth significantly more than the amount they tithed.”
Meanwhile, the residents suing AUB claim that it has made their lives difficult by excluding them from the school, store, church and community events. The AUB has even declared them to be “apostates,” which Lynch said causes great pain among the many residents who feel as though it was AUB who abandoned the religious principles that many residents adhere to.
Stoker, and others who gathered and agreed to speak with Montana Free Press, said that the lack of deeds to the land they live on is a weighty burden, one that community members have worked hard to overcome.
“The quickest way to grow wealth in America is to own shit,” Stoker said. “Your house is how you’re going to get wealth. I have no intention to move, but I’d love to have the ability to have a line of credit so if I wanted to go and buy a piece of dirt somewhere else and build something else, I could do that. I would love to have control of my destiny instead of being under the thumb.”
The two district court judges in Ravalli County have recused themselves from the case, and the lawsuit is being decided by District Judge Matthew Wald from Montana’s 22nd Judicial District, which encompasses Stillwater, Carbon and Big Horn counties. Wald heard oral arguments in January but has yet to issue a ruling.
Another community member, who spoke with the Montana Free Press on the condition of anonymity, offered that the plaintiffs are suing “to create our own story. Everything that we invest onto our property is our home. We want to be able to make the choice to further that down the road. Like to even be able to change directions in life and say you want to move to a different state… You can’t sell your home on land that you don’t own.”
“Just because my dad or grandpa chose to live this way and subscribe to this ideal, you know, we don’t.”
