The fourth episode in our series, Movements on the Margins, examines the establishment of a cult on the banks of the Buffalo in the early 1920s. John Battenfield, a charismatic preacher and scholar of Hebrew and Greek, moved with a group of his followers to Gilbert, Arkansas, to prepare for a worldwide war between Catholics and Protestants. In short order, they built a community with stores, forges, a church, and perhaps most important, a printing press. When the war failed to materialize, Battenfield tried to a raise a girl from the dead. When that failed to materialize, he had a nervous breakdown, and in 1925 he left for a sanatorium in New York. But the story doesn't end there. In a downward spiral of increasingly bizarre behavior, the group sputtered along until it finally disbanded in 1930. Join the Chronicles for another quirky story about a Movement on the Margins.

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