FLDS neighbors worry Texans

ELDORADO, Texas — The jokes have already started, in the cafes and on Main Street, but they draw more nervous laughter than actual merriment. Some men ask where they can apply to be a husband; others say, no thanks, one wife is trouble enough.

Polygamy is funnier from afar and less so with proximity.

This west-central Texas town is about to become home to about 200 members of a renegade religious group that, in defiance of the law, practices polygamy, with the men taking multiple wives and raising dozens of children under a single roof.

"Everybody's shocked," Jimmy Doyle, the justice of the peace, said with little exaggeration.

They've talked of little else in this remote town since private pilots such as Doyle began noticing some odd construction sprouting up on a former ranch just north of town. The ranch had been sold some months back to a man from Utah who said he was going to turn it into a hunting retreat — but instead of a lodge or cabins that might be expected to house sportsmen, five large dormitory-style buildings have been built.

Residents began poking around, and someone noticed that the buildings looked much like those shown on a television report about a group called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or FLDS, the nation's largest polygamist sect with 10,000 members.

The group, which broke away from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over the issue of polygamy, largely lives in the adjacent towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., where, increasingly, it has attracted unwanted attention from law enforcement officials and the media investigating charges of underage marriages, child abuse and welfare fraud.

Polygamist neighbors

Highly secretive, the group finally broke its silence here in Eldorado about a month ago, when four FLDS elders confirmed what the townspeople had already figured out — that polygamists were moving in, practically next door.

The newcomers have not made many — if any — friends here in this town of about 2,000, where residents are offended both by the cloak of secrecy under which the group moved to town, as well as by its practice of multiple marriages.

"This is a small town, and it's scary for us that these people don't believe the same as we do," said Connie Andrews, a longtime resident who owns an insurance agency here. "If they were on the up and up, if they're not embarrassed of themselves, why don't they just say, 'This is who we are.' "