MILEPOSTS #1072

By Ken Brafman, Image from Wikimedia Commons

TITLE: PISGAH HOME: UTOPIAN EXPERIMENT: Finis Ewing Yoakum was born in 1851 in Texas. He attended Trinity University and started practicing medicine in 1872, and later attended Hospital College of Medicine in Louisville, Kentucky, graduating in 1885. In addition to being a physician in the western states he was also a businessman and at one time was president of several different mining and railroad companies. Dr. Yoakum’s life changed in 1894 when he was struck by a buggy while teaching in Denver, and seriously injured. After a year and a half of constant pain, infections, and the loss of half his body weight, he moved his family to California. Following a prayer meeting in Los Angeles, he experienced a miraculous healing. All pain was gone, and he improved dramatically. Within three months he had gained 90 pounds and returned to his practice. By 1906 he had given up practicing medicine altogether. He opened a faith center called Pisgah Home, named for the Hebrew for mountaintop, and built cottages to take in those dying of tuberculosis, called Pisgah Gardens. There was a prayer tower built that was manned 24 hours a day. He often worked with alcoholics, drug addicts, and the homeless and reported hundreds of healings which also included cancer, goiters, tuberculosis, and feeble-mindedness. Yoakum prayed over handkerchiefs and mailed them to people requesting prayer from a distance. This week’s image is a newspaper clipping photo circa 1910 which highlights some of virtues. His ministry grew, and he opened locations in the Santa Susana Mountains, and near the Cedar Springs area, which was a community that was absorbed into Silverwood Lake in the early 1970s. While his main legacy is his heart for the lost, indigent, and physically and spiritually broken, today ‘Pisgah Grande’ is regarded as a failed utopian experiment. Still, when Yoakum died in 1920 there were large numbers of mourners. He was 69.

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