Who was “Little Mary” (Mary Evelyn Skaggs)

    
    Mary Evelyn Skaggs was the first child of Joseph Roscoe Skaggs and Gracie M. Brewer. She was born in January of 1910, according to the 1910 census of Ironton, Lawrence County, Ohio. She was one of ten children born to her father and mother. She had a religious upbringing; her father was a deacon at the Pentecostal Church of Christ beginning in 1908. Being the eldest child, she was counted on to help raise her siblings. She was enthralled by sermons and songs at church, and studied the Bible from an early age, gaining a uncanny knowledge in the Word of God. Some say she was a descendant of Reverend Peter Skaggs, (Old Peter Skaggs)
    By the1920s the Pentecostal faith began to spread deep into Kentucky and West Virginia. As a young girl she was quickly becoming a legend. She had received her papers to preach at the annual Pentecostal Conference that was held in Flatwood Kentucky, in 1924. She was only in her early teens but would go on to be one of the most successful evangelists the Pentecostal Church has ever seen. Her tent revivals drew people from all over the area and they were enchanted by her charismatic sermons, and her knowledge of the Bible.
    One can look through the old articles of the Pentecostal Witness and find out how active this young lady was. She traveled throughout Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia at a breakneck speed, spreading the gospel of the Holy Ghost. Not only converting people to Christ but adding to a growing number of new and enthusiastic preachers. The constant travel and fame started taking its toll. She became quite ill in 1932 and was forced to stop her preaching. During the last year of her life, she lamented not being able to do more. In an interview she stated, “Ill health has prevented my work as an evangelist, when I look over my report and saw so little I had done, I could not refrain from crying.” Sadly, she passed away on December 1, 1933, after saving thousands of souls. She was elected to the Pentecostal Hall of Fame.

Who was William H Duty?

   William Henry Duty was born August 4, 1876, in Lawrence County, Kentucky, to David Duty and Sarah Josephine Hunt. In 1880 he was living in Louisa, Kentucky with his parents and two younger sisters. His father was a farm hand, and William soon followed in his father’s footsteps, tilling the dirt to keep the family fed.
   On November 2, 1896, in Martin County, Kentucky, he married Pinky Meeks Daniels. This marriage did not last long, and he had married again in 1899, to 16-year-old Sarah Cisco. Again, this marriage did not work out and on April 21, 1904, William H Duty married 16-year-old Annie Standifer. Yet again, this marriage failed and on April 27, 1907, he married 15-year-old Pearl Porter. Duty had joined the US Army in the early part of the 1900s but was dishonorably discharged on October 29, 1908, at Fort Thomas Kentucky. His marriage to Pearl lasted until at least September of 1918, because Pearl is listed as his wife on his draft registration at that time. William’s last marriage of record was to Anna Booth. They were married on January 19, 1921, in White House, Johnson County, Kentucky. He was 45, and Anna was 15 years old. This marriage lasted until her death on April 5, 1939. William had nine children from these marriages.
   As with most people in this area William H Duty continued to farm to put food on the table. In 1910 he also had a job as a laborer at the coalmine in Buffalo, Johnson County, Kentucky. He would later become a trackman, carrying men, coal, and debris in and out of the mines with small carts hooked up to a tractor running on a rail system. He was growing tired of all this manual labor and was constantly searching for an easier way to make money. That way was about to present itself.
   In the 1920s the Pentecostal faith began to spread into Kentucky and West Virginia. There was a young girl from Ironton, Ohio, who was quickly becoming a legend. Her name was Mary Evelyn Skaggs. She received her papers to preach at the annual Pentecostal Conference that was held in Flatwood Kentucky, in 1924. She was only in her early teens but would go on to be one of the most successful evangelists the Pentecostal Church has ever seen. Her tent revivals drew people from all over the area and they were in enchanted by her charismatic sermons, and her knowledge of the Bible. Sadly, she became quite ill in 1932 and was forced to stop her preaching. Sadly, she passed away on December 1, 1933, after saving thousands of souls.
   There is no doubt that William H Duty witnessed Mary Skaggs in action, and saw the possibilities presented before him. It wouldn’t be long before he started his own tent revivals imitating Mary in every way possible.   
  

Who was John Hampton Mills

    John Hampton Mills was born August 12, 1899, in Stafford Fork, Martin County, Kentucky. His parents were Laben T. Mills and Lucinda Ward. He was one of fourteen children born to the couple. He had an eighth-grade education, which was above average for those living in this area of Kentucky. He worked in farming and also had a job at the Cumberland Gas Company, working as a repairman.
    In 1924 at the age of 25, he married 18-year-old Alma Ida Hall who was from Ashland, Kentucky. Over the next eight years, they were blessed with five children, three boys and two girls. With the sudden death of his daughter, Avanelle in 1929, John fell into a deep depression. John lost his job with the gas company because he was missing so much work. He was searching for answers about his daughter’s death when he met William H. Duty. The two hit it off and together they planted a Pentecostal church in the village of Tomahawk.
    The church quickly became successful, and tension started to grow between the two men over who was in charge. The two men came to blows and John was kicked out of the church. He started preaching on his own. He was getting quite a reputation as a healer and miracle worker. His followers grew to about thirty people including family members and neighbors.
    After two weeks of fasting, praying, singing, and dancing, his followers who were delirious by this time fell under John’s control. He told them he had received a “Divine Command” from God for a human sacrifice. He revealed that William H. Duty was to be sacrificed. They were unsuccessful in their attempt to lure Mr. Duty into their trap. This was followed up by another unsuccessful attempt when John decided to sacrifice his sister Ora Moore and his sister-in-law Trixie Mills. At the home of Tomie Boyd, on February 7, 1933, the Cult of the Unknown Tongues, as they had come to be known were successful in sacrificing Lucinda Mills, John’s mother.
    At this time the cult had dwindled to only eight family members and John. A sheriff and some deputies were sent to the cabin by concerned neighbors. They arrived only moments too late, finding John kneeling on top of his mother. He had strangled her to death while the other cult members watched, chanted, and danced about. All nine of the cult members were arrested and stood trial. John Hampton Mills was found guilty of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison. His nephew Ballard Mills and his brother-in-law Blaine McGinnis were sentenced to 21 years in prison for their part in the murder. The rest of the cult members were found not guilty.
    John was paroled on April 21, 1941, after serving only eight years. Alma had divorced him while he was in prison. She remarried and had left Kentucky. John moved to Akron Ohio where he married Icie Bell Boggs. They were married and divorced three times.
    John spent his last days back in Martin County, living close to the sister he tried to sacrifice, Ora Moore. He passed away on June 15, 1968, in Tomahawk, Martin County, Kentucky. He is buried at the Mills Cemetery. 
   

Who was Lucinda Mills?

   Lucinda Mills was born just after the Civil War in December 1866. She was born in Johnson County, Kentucky, to Stephen Ward and Sarah Jane Skeen. As a child she lived with different relatives off and on as there were siblings from a previous marriage. Her mother Sarah was married to Martin Gilliam in 1856. He died in 1862 at the age of 30, from pneumonia. Her biological father, Stephen Ward, wasn’t around much so Sarah needed help from her family to raise her children.
 Lucinda married Laben T. Mills December 3, 1881, in Martin County, Kentucky. They were married by Minister B. Ward. They had a total of fourteen children, nine boys, and five girls. Laben was a farmer and also worked at the lumber mill near Tomahawk.
   Both Lucinda and Laben were baptized by the Baptist church. Lucinda was active in the church, but Laben was not. He was baptized only days before he passed away. The family carried him from his death bed to the creek behind their house for the ceremony. He passed away July 14, 1914, at the age of 51. In his will, Laben left all the property, about six hundred acres, to Lucinda with the stipulation that after her death the property go to his youngest son Fred, which was against the norm of bequeathing property to the eldest son after the death of the wife. John Hampton Mills was next in line after Fred. (I’ve often wondered if this had anything to do with the sacrifices John said God was calling for.)
   Lucinda spent most of the next two decades worrying about keeping her family together. The land she owned was not good for much of anything. They were barely able to squeeze enough crops out of it to sustain their own needs, let alone sell anything for profit. It was also flooded on a regular basis. She was a strong, God-fearing woman, and a survivor. Against all odds she was able to keep her family on her husband’s land until her untimely death at the hands of her son, John Hampton Mills.

Who was Alma Ida Hall?

   Alma Ida Hall the wife of John Hampton Mills was born December 7, 1907, in Oklahoma while her family was on a trip to visit relatives. She was one of twelve children born to Ulysses Simpson Grant Hall and Zella R Akers. Alma grew up in and around Ashland, Boyd County Kentucky. Being the oldest daughter, she was always helping her parents and siblings.
   She married John Hampton Mills on Septer 24, 1924 in Martin County, Kentucky. Over the next eight years the couple was blessed with two girls and three boys. Alma loved taking care of John and the children in their little cabin on the hill in Stafford Fork. The loss of her daughter Avanelle in 1929 to measles and pneumonia was devastating to Alma and the whole family as one might expect. It was an event that neither her nor her husband John would ever fully recover from.
   The years leading up to the tragedy that took place in February 1933, and the ordeal of everything that followed took a toll on Alma and John’s Marriage. She divorced him while he was incarcerated for the crime he so viciously committed. But as she showed during those times, she was a survivor. She took her children back to Ashland Kentucky and moved in with her mother and father.
   A recently divorced man by the name of John Dennison Brogan started taking some interested in Alma. They were married in 1945, and they would have a son together on March 1, 1947. His name was Daniel Leroy Brogan. Soon, they moved along with all of Alma’s children to Baltimore Maryland. John Brogan and Alma along with Tommy and Daniel, moved to Pascagoula, Jackson County Mississippi in 1957. Alma’s’ husband died in August of 1965 and was buried in Moss Point Jackson County, Mississippi at the Serene Memory Gardens. Alma became ill in July of 1972 and passed November 21, 1972, in Pascagoula, Mississippi. She is buried beside her husband. Alma is my 4^th cousin two times removed.

Who was Attorney J. B. Clark
(James Blaine Clark)

James Blaine Clark was born May 5, 1884, at Daniel’s Creek, Johnson County Kentucky to Samuel Clark and Susannah Wells. His father was a farmer and was a descendant of one of the pioneer families of Eastern Kentucky. It was through his father that he learned the value of a strong work ethic. By 1910 the family had moved to Eden, in Martin County and J B would spend the next twenty years building a life there. He did extremely well in school and went on to graduate from Eastern Kentucky Normal School of Prestonsburg in 1905. He later entered the Danville Law School, Danville, Indiana from which he graduated in 1908. He married Lutie E. Delong, daughter of John P. Delong and Sally Wells of Martin County on February 15, 1907, and was the father of four children. He was an active member of the First Methodist Church of Paintsville.
In 1909 he became a teacher in the schools of Martin County. Eight years later he was elected Martin County Attorney, which led to his long and prestigious career in that office. J B Clark served in both Johnson and Martin Counties as a public official for forty years. He was elected State Senator in 1924 and served the people of his district until 1928 when he was elected to the office of Commonwealth's Attorney of Johnson and Martin Counties. J B was again elected for a four-year term as the County Attorney of Martin County in 1938. He also was named a member of the Board of Regents of Moorhead State Teachers College and served in that there for four years. In 1943 he was re-elected Commonwealth's Attorney of the 24th Judicial District and was re-elected in 1945 for a six-year term. He died suddenly of a heart attack on February 11, 1952, at his home in Paintsville, Johnson County, Kentucky.

Who was Wallace Blaine McGinnis

Born on June 17, 1884, in the rugged terrain of Kentucky, the youngest of five siblings. Wallace Blaine McGinnis lived a life shaped by family, faith, and the unforgiving landscape of Appalachia. The son of James Monroe McGinnis and Louisa J. Brown, he was part of a long line of McGinnis families with deep roots in the region. The surname McGinnis is derived from the Gaelic Mag Aonghusa, meaning “son of Aonghus.” It’s linked to a chieftain family from County Down, Ireland, and many of the McGinnis families in Kentucky trace their ancestry back to this region.
Blaine married Mollie Mills in 1906, and together they raised a family that included Edgar, Elmer, and Roy B. McGinnis. For decades, Blaine lived quietly, working the land and raising his children in Martin County. But on February 7, 1933, his life took a dark turn. During a twisted version of a Pentecostal revival outside of Tomahawk Kentucky, Blaine became entangled in the ritualistic murder of his mother-in-law, Lucinda Mills, a crime that shocked the nation. Her son, John H. Mills, led the act, claiming divine instruction.

The trial was a media spectacle, casting a harsh light on religious extremism and the vulnerability of isolated communities. Just weeks later in March 1933, Wallace’s eldest son Edgar died of tuberculosis at age 23. The grief was compounded by his own conviction as an accessory to Lucinda’s murder. Blaine’s conviction seemed to seal his fate as a cautionary figure, a man swept up in blind faith and silence. Though he was pardoned by November, the damage was done. That winter, his wife Mollie died of uterine cancer, leaving Blaine emotionally adrift.
He would later marry Ora Mills Moore, the woman who had narrowly escaped Lucinda’s fate. In a chilling extension of that hysteria, Ora Mills Moore (Wallace’s future wife) and Trixie Mills (Fred Mills’ wife, nine months pregnant) were chained to a pyre, nearly consumed in the flames. Trixie’s desperate cries, "Don’t do this, my baby, my baby", stalled the act. The women survived only because John wanted a willing victim. Blaine and Ora’s bond, born of trauma and shared survival, was an unlikely patch on a tattered family legacy. He died in January 1969, in Culver, Elliott County, Kentucky. His story is a haunting reminder of how belief can bend into destruction, and how the survivors of tragedy bear its weight for decades.

Who was Fred Roy Mills?


Fred Roy Mills was born on August 6, 1906, in Tomahawk, Martin County, Kentucky. He was the youngest child of Lucinda Ward and Laben T. Mills. Raised in the rugged hills of eastern Kentucky, Fred lived a modest life shaped by hardship, faith, and family. Despite suffering from poor eyesight, he worked a small plot of land gifted to him by his mother after the death of his father, sustaining his household through subsistence farming.

Fred married Trixie Cline Hall, with whom he had six children. Their life together was marked by devotion and resilience, especially during one of the most harrowing chapters in Appalachian religious history.

In the early 1930s, Fred became involved with the Cult of the Unknown Tongues, a fringe Pentecostal sect led by his brother, John H. Mills. In February 1933, during a ten-day revival in Tomahawk, the group’s fervent rituals escalated into tragedy. Under the influence of ecstatic religious visions, fasting, sleep deprivation, and speaking in tongues, John declared their mother, Lucinda, a divine sacrifice and strangled her on an improvised altar. Fred was present during the event. Before Lucinda’s death, Fred’s wife, Trixie—nine months pregnant at the time—and his sister, Ora Mills Moore, were nearly sacrificed as well. The ritual was interrupted by Trixie’s fervent protest before John was ready to set them ablaze. John, along with brother-in-law Blaine McGinnis and nephew Ballard Mills, were later convicted of murder and accessory to murder, respectively.

Although Fred was charged along with other members of the cult, he was not convicted. The event cast a long shadow over his life. He remained in Tomahawk, where he lived quietly until his death on July 20, 1992, at the age of 85. Shortly before Fred passed, he told family members that all involved with the cult were responsible for Lucinda’s death. Fred also claimed that John had been possessed by the Devil.

Fred’s story stands as a haunting reminder of the extremes of religious zeal and the enduring strength of family in the face of unimaginable trauma.

Who Was Ballard Mills?

Ballard C. Mills was born on February 2, 1913, in Eden, a quiet patch of Martin County, Kentucky. He was one of five children born to Laben T. Mills Jr. and Adia Bell Williamson. Raised on the family farm, Ballard’s early years were shaped by hard labor and rural life—but tragedy would soon shift the course of his destiny.

After his mother’s death, Ballard’s father turned to alcohol and became abusive. Seeking safety and stability, Ballard left home and moved in with his aunt Mollie McGinnis and her husband Blaine, who lived near Tomahawk, Kentucky. It was there, in the Appalachian foothills, that Ballard’s life took a dark and infamous turn.

He became involved with a fringe religious sect known as the Cult of the Unknown Tongues, led by his uncle, John H. Mills. In 1933, Ballard and seven other family members were charged in the ritualistic murder of his grandmother, Lucinda Mills—a case that shocked the nation and dominated headlines with its disturbing tale of human sacrifice.

Ballard was convicted as an accessory to murder and sentenced to 21 years in prison. Yet, in a surprising twist, he was pardoned by Governor Ruby Lafoon after serving just two years. On May 24, 1935, Ballard walked free.

Determined to rebuild his life, he found work as a Track Man for the Sycamore Coal Company in Mingo County, West Virginia. A year later, on September 26, 1936, he married Lexie Muriel Williams in Pike County, Kentucky. Together, they raised seven children—four girls and three boys—and Ballard seemed to find peace in the ordinary.

He became a devoted churchgoer, attending services weekly. Though he never owned a car, he faithfully rode the bus to church, handing out bubble gum to children as a sweet reward for their attendance. According to his 1940 draft registration, Ballard stood 5’10”, weighed 160 pounds, and had blue eyes and black hair—a man marked by quiet resilience.

Ballard Mills died on March 26, 1981, in South Williamson, Kentucky. He was laid to rest at Mountain View Memory Gardens in Maher, West Virginia—a man whose life straddled the line between redemption and infamy.