Aiding the Downtrodden, Seeking to Build a Utopia

Finis Ewing Yoakum found deliverance in Los Angeles and spread it around. He battled misery and sin with soup and salvation, taking in saloon bums, prostitutes and even a reputed gunslinger.

Yoakum created a religious compound in Highland Park that still stands, though the movement it housed broke up years ago. Part of the property, off the Pasadena Freeway, is now known as Christ Faith Mission Pisgah Home. He also built other shelters, including a utopian community in Simi Valley that is nothing but rubble now.

Born in Texas, the charismatic Yoakum was a physician who specialized in neurological disorders. He taught about mental disorders at a Denver medical school.

His life changed in 1894 as he was getting off a streetcar in that city. A speeding horse-drawn wagon driven by a drunken ice deliveryman ran him down, according to Yoakum’s great-grandson, Peter Yoakum of Bainbridge Island, Wash.

“Dr. Fey, as we called him, was trampled and left there in a heap,” Peter Yoakum said in a recent interview.

Despite surgery to repair his injuries, the doctor’s health deteriorated. “I was many times given up for dead,” Yoakum later wrote in his newsletter. His surgical wound failed to heal for at least four months.

He stood more than 6 feet tall and exceeded 200 pounds before the accident, but lost half his body weight from blood poisoning and fever, he wrote.

In a last-ditch effort to recover, Yoakum fled Colorado’s winters and brought his wife and five children to Los Angeles.

In February 1895, he went to a Christian Alliance prayer meeting downtown, where a Presbyterian minister anointed him with oil and prayed over him. “My pain was more than I could endure,” Yoakum wrote. But as he left, he said, it vanished.

Sometime thereafter, unable to sleep, he climbed a hill along the Arroyo Seco to pray.

Yoakum believed that God responded with these words: “I have no hands, no feet, no mouth. I want yours.”

“You can have them,” Yoakum replied, according to his writings. “All I have is yours.”

Vowing to better the lot of the poor, he named the hill Mt. Pisgah -- after the peak atop Mt. Nebo from which Moses saw the Promised Land. Yoakum named his subsequent charitable enterprises Pisgah too. In 1896, he opened a medical practice in the Bradbury Building downtown, specializing in mental diseases. He also built a home on Echo Street in Highland Park.

The property, first known as Yoakum’s Sanatorium, came to look like a tent city, offering a vegetarian diet and ample portions of the Gospel. Followers erected the tents, bungalows and other buildings next to his Queen Anne-style home, where he and his wife, Mary, continued to live. His barn became a church lined with beds.

Yoakum was an early leader in the Pentecostal movement, which began in L.A. in 1906. By then, his home was already a mecca for “foot-sore” hobos and the downtrodden. By 1907, it was known as the Pisgah Home.

Yoakum branched out to other parts of L.A., establishing the Pisgah Gardens for tuberculosis patients in North Hollywood in 1906. Two years later, he founded Pisgah Ark in the Arroyo Seco, where he taught young prostitutes how to earn a living as midwives. He opened the Pisgah store nearby to distribute clothing and other goods.

At a 1908 revival meeting in Pomona, Yoakum blessed a pile of handkerchiefs that were given to the sick. Soon, healings were reported in his Pisgah newsletter. Believers across the country began requesting hankies that they believed had curative powers, paying $5 for each.

Yoakum handed out handfuls of nickels to converts and told them to go to skid row and give the homeless a nickel -- the cost of a trolley ride -- and directions to the Pisgah Home.

The best recommendation he received came from a bartender, Yoakum wrote. “After kicking a young man out of the saloon, he handed him a nickel and said, ‘Now you either go to hell or to Yoakum’s.’ ”

In 1913, Halstead “Billy” Stiles, 60, notorious for his gunslinging and train robberies in Mexico and Arizona, turned up in L.A. He claimed to be the William Stiles who was part of Jesse James’ gang and participated in the famous Northfield, Minn., bank robbery attempt in 1876. Billy said Stiles wasn’t really killed during that botched crime.

The gunslinger was hiding from the law when he slipped into the Union Rescue Mission downtown. Later, he would say that as he sat, he planned a train robbery, but that the place and the sermon changed his mind.

“My soul was black with many a crime, but the Lord took me and washed me as white as wool,” he wrote in a 1914 Pisgah publication. “I was not reformed, but transformed.”

Stiles soon made his way to the Pisgah Home. In 1914, The Times reported, he spoke at the Union Rescue Mission, describing his journey from crime to his newfound faith.

That same year, Yoakum and his wife turned over their crowded property to the homeless. In return, indigents built them a Tudor-style mansion at the Avenue 59 end of Echo Street. The structure is now a privately owned historic landmark.

The courts sent vagrants to Pisgah, which was housing and feeding tens of thousands a month, according to its newsletters. The size and fervor of Yoakum’s flock drew the enmity of his neighbors, who accused him of attracting too many “down and outs” to the area. So Yoakum purchased a 3,200-acre ranch in Simi Valley for $50,000.

There, brick by brick, 50 of his followers built Pisgah Grande, a utopia far into the Santa Susana Mountains. They made the bricks on site from the clay soil, stamping each one “PISGAH.” The colony included the mission headquarters, a schoolhouse, a dining hall, cabins, a post office and a prayer tower.

William Appleton, a fourth-generation Simi Valley native who lives in Beverly Hills, has one of the Pisgah bricks. He was co-author of the 1997 book “Simi Valley: A Journey Through Time,” with Patricia Havens.

More than 400 of Yoakum’s followers moved into the compound. They raised crops and goats and planted orchards, Appleton said. The prayer tower was manned 24 hours a day; residents took turns praying for those who mailed in requests.

“Dr. Yoakum brought all kinds of people to his colony,” the book quotes longtime Simi Valley resident Ruby Taylor Stevens as saying. “There was one man who walked backwards ... all the way down to Santa Susana,” nearly eight miles away.

But the movement failed to outlast the man. After Yoakum died in August 1920 at 69, followers scattered. He had left control of the movement to his sons, who didn’t want it.

“They only wanted the money,” historian Mel Robeck of Pasadena’s Fuller Theological Seminary said recently.

Health officials closed Pisgah Grande for unsanitary conditions, forcing 75 residents to leave. Yoakum’s sons sold it in 1924. The family retained the Pisgah Home. James Cheek, a resident who had been cured of TB, became the leader.

In the late 1930s, Yoakum’s sons either deeded or sold the property to Christ Faith Mission, directed by Arglee F. Green, a social worker known as Mother Green. The Christian group still runs it today but does not offer free food or shelter.

“My grandfather, Finis Jr., was a dreamer and schemer and an engineer by training,” said Peter Yoakum. “He was not a practical sort. He and his brothers” invested the funds from the sale “in speculative gold-mining stock and lost it all in the [1929] crash.”

Christ Faith Mission has sold most of the property over the last few years to Pisgah Village LP, controlled by Richard Kim, who is also involved with the mission. Some of the land is being redeveloped as low-cost housing for seniors. But the mission itself, with its barn-like church and other Queen Anne and Craftsman bungalows, is being preserved as part of the federal Save America’s Treasures.