In the days of the great ‘sawdust trail’, a circuit of itinerant preachers traveled through southern towns, using buildings and locations that had been employed for generations by popular men of God, men like Billy Graham, Dwight L Moody and the baseball player turned evangelist Billy Sunday. The circuit was a launching pad of sorts for revival meetings. Sermons were often delivered in tents, and the floors were covered in sawdust to keep down the dirt, thus the saying, ‘hitting the sawdust trail’. One of the sawdust stars, popular in the 1960s, ended up founding a controversial church in Bangs.

The bizarre, sometimes dark career of evangelical leader David Terrell and his ‘Terrellites’, as his followers were dubbed, left me with more questions than answers. Biographical facts on Terrell are hazy. He was a startlingly good-looking man with deep blue eyes and the smile of an angel. He first noticed Bangs in 1973, according to information published on the website william-branham.org. God told him in a vision, he claimed, that Bangs would be one of a handful of places to survive the coming nuclear apocalypse. “We are right now ripe for the Anti-Christ except for one hope,” Terrell wrote. “My people are going to have to move into the country and learn how to survive, make their own clothes.” Bangs, of all places, was the chosen refuge. Terrell wrote to his followers, urging them to drop everything and move to Bangs at once. Hundreds did just that. Many lost all they had.

Disturbing stories of people giving up their livelihoods to follow Terrell to Bangs are not uncommon. In 1974, The Victoria Advocate published an article warning about Terrell’s church. It says that two children died in the town from lack of medical care while their parents awaited the healing powers of Terrell. The Bangs sheriff was furious.

A man named Tommy Smith came to Bangs at the height of the Terrell frenzy. He was not following Terrell’s teachings, but instead was trying to retrieve his children from his Terrellite wife. “One day I come in from work and she [his wife] said, ‘you wanta go to Texas.’ She said, ‘I’m going.’ I said ‘Fine, but you’re not taking the three boys.’ But she did. ‘I want my boys and I want that little ring,’ he said, referring to a `4 karat, $22 wedding band. ‘She took the ring off her finger, man, and dropped it in the collection… She’ll take stuff out of ice box…and put it in the collection,” Smith was quoted as saying. His wife had gone so far as to donate her own shoes, the reporter who wrote the article stated, noting she was barefoot when he spoke to her.

Was the Bangs escapade the work of a charlatan, or was he the ‘Jesus Man’ his followers called him? Maybe the truth is some of both. A tell-all memoir was published by Donna Johnson, the daughter of Terrell’s piano player. Johnson grew up in the charismatic man’s movement. She took an interesting view of the whole thing, reporting that he had fathered three children with her mother, all the while telling her he would divorce his wife to marry her, which he never did. He had many other women. On the other hand, Johnson did not disclaim the man’s abilities, testifying that she saw him heal people and perform miracles. She seemed traumatized by the whole thing, yet she still cared a great deal about Terrell and wrote about him in friendly, even loving tones. Johnson is not alone. I saw hundreds of posts online saying how much he changed their lives for the good.

David Terrell, who is still preaching at the age of 90 as far as I can tell, reportedly amassed a fortune in the millions from his calling, a detail I cannot confirm. He did ride around in a chauffeured Mercedes and lived in some degree of luxury. A young, charismatic man—charming, intelligent and keenly insightful—becomes to thousands almost a god-like figure. He had women literally at his feet. This proved to be an insurmountable temptation. Terrell was pursued relentlessly by the Ku Klux Klan because he refused to segregate his congregations on the sawdust trail. Blacks and whites worshiped together in his meetings in the 1960s. He was repeatedly beaten and stalked by Klan members over this, and his assistant was hospitalized after an attack by the Klan. Terrell stood firm. God told him the blacks and whites must be together, and he would obey God and not men. It’s hard to find what the truth of it all is. Terrell was eventually convicted of tax fraud, but his reason for it was pretty good. I mean, if the world is ending in a year, the last thing you want to do is fiddle around with filing taxes, right?

The whole story is so southern gothic—the last great sawdust trail preacher, an enigmatic man, both a shadow and a light. My husband said Terrell’s tale reminds him of the movie The Apostle, which chronicles a southern preacher, a holy roller as they are called, who ends up in prison. While in prison, he converts a bunch of the inmates to Jesus. He was a believer and an unbeliever, in one. Maybe most of us are a bit that way? Was Terrell sincere, a man who fell from grace with women and money, who tried to cover it up by saying God told him to do it? Or was he just an outright conman, deliberately preying on naive followers? Like a lot of things in life, the more you look at it, the more you feel you don’t know as much as you thought you did. Perhaps Shakespeare explains this sort of thing best: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns appear Thursdays on BrownwoodNews.com