A tract of land in Minnesota with links to a polygamous religious sect once led by Warren Jeffs has been put up for sale by the convicted sex offender’s brother.
Residents near the town of Grand Marais had feared the remote 40-acre plot of forest land, bought by Seth Jeffs in 2018, would be used to establish a new compound for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS).
Warren Jeffs led the Utah-based sect until he was sentenced to life in prison in 2011 for sexually abusing underage girls among his dozens of child brides.
The land is for sale at $189,000, according to the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, from a Montana-registered entity Emerald Industries LLC, linked to Seth Jeffs.
The Associated Press reported that he also bought 80.5 acres of land near Menomonie, Wisconsin, in 2020, which he continues to own. The news agency said a call to a phone listing for him was not immediately returned Thursday.
Seth Jeffs pleaded guilty in 2006 to concealing his brother, who was captured while on the run, but did not face any sex abuse charges. In the years following Warren Jeffs’s imprisonment, Seth Jeffs became the replacement face of the FLDS, a radical offshoot of mainstream Mormonism. He admitted to food stamp fraud in 2016 in a scheme to divert benefits to church members.
The year before, he raised fears that the group was about to expand its operations in South Dakota by requesting from state officials a doubling of the water allocation to its 140-acre compound about 30 miles from Mount Rushmore.
Reports at the time suggested the request was to accommodate an influx of church members displaced during a crackdown on the sect by authorities in Utah. Jeffs denied the claim, insisting the 75 people estimated to live there “just need more water”, but the belief that the sect was actively looking to expand persisted, heightened by the later land purchases in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
The FLDS split from the main Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church, after the latter renounced polygamy in 1890. Seth and Warren Jeffs’s father, Rulon Jeffs, held leadership roles in the FLDS church for many years, obeyed in the strict patriarchy as a prophet of God whose word was divine.
The polygamists, under Warren Jeffs’s leadership, had about 10,000 followers at the time of his sentencing and were based in an isolated town on the Utah-Arizona border, where many FLDS members still live and practice their faith. The jury heard that he personally had about 78 wives, including 12 whom he married when they were 16, and 12 he married aged 15 or younger.
The compound in South Dakota’s Black Hills was bought at auction in 2019 by three former members who broke with the sect several years previously. A judge had ordered it sold to pay for a lawsuit settlement.
Nothing was ever built on the Minnesota property, said Tim Nelson, Cook county’s land services director. In 2019, the county ordered Emerald Industries to stop working on the site because of land-use and septic permit violations. The issues were resolved, but Seth Jeffs did not reapply after the permits expired.
“It’s just a nice North Woods property,” said real estate agent Jacob Patten, of Red Pine Realty, which has the listing. According to the online description: “The property has been improved with a nice gravel driveway, selective tree and brush clearing, and many newly planted pines, maple seedlings and all the beautiful prairie grasses.”
