The Dark & Mysterious History of America’s First Cult

We love talking about cults around here, that’s no secret. It’s tragic, it’s sad, but also so fascinating. Matching robes, hazy photos, apocalyptic preachers… But the truth is, America’s first real cult didn’t appear in the Summer of Love. It didn’t involve LSD, desert compounds, or doomsday bunkers. It happened way, way earlier—in a time when the United States was barely a concept, still messy and figuring out what it even was.

At the center of it all was a single, baffling figure: Jemima Wilkinson, later known only as The Public Universal Friend. This was a person who stepped into early American history somewhere between preacher, celebrity, prophet, and total enigma. This is the weird, haunting, and surprisingly modern chapter of U.S. history that textbooks totally skip: the story of the first American cult, born right in the smoke of the Revolutionary War.

A Prophet Is “Born”

The origin story of America’s first cult begins with a moment that sounds like the opening scene of a gothic horror novel. The year was 1776. While Thomas Jefferson was busy stressing over the wording of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, a young Quaker woman in Rhode Island named Jemima Wilkinson fell violently ill with typhus. The fever was catastrophic. According to family members and later followers, Jemima actually died. As in, fever broke, breath stopped, pulse gone.

But then, the body woke up. Except, the person who opened those eyes claimed they were no longer Jemima Wilkinson. Jemima, the survivor announced, had died and gone to heaven. The body was now merely a vessel, reanimated and occupied by a genderless, eternal spirit sent directly by God to preach a new truth before the end of days. This new being refused to answer to the name Jemima ever again. Instead, it adopted a title: The Public Universal Friend.

Imagine hearing that in 1776. The colonies are in the middle of a war, everything is chaotic, and suddenly this person shows up claiming to be a divine spirit who is neither male nor female. The Friend’s message wasn’t violent or chaotic—if anything, it was surprisingly wholesome. It was all about rejecting sin, ignoring greed, living simply, and treating everyone equally. But the delivery? It was wild.

The “Cult” That Scared Everyone by Being… Normal?

Most early cults involved fire, brimstone, and some type of scams. But the Friend’s followers, who called themselves the Society of Universal Friends, weren’t out burning down cities. They were… strangely normal?

They were mostly former Quakers who felt the mainstream church had gotten too stiff and boring. They worked hard on farms. They founded settlements. They preached pacifism. They essentially built one of the earliest utopian communities in upstate New York, decades before groups like the Shakers or the Oneida Perfectionists made it trendy.

So why did the rest of the country absolutely lose its mind over them? Because the Public Universal Friend challenged the two things early America treated as sacred: Traditional Christianity and Gender Roles.

The Friend didn’t just say they were genderless; they lived it. The Friend stopped using gendered pronouns, dressed in a mix of men’s and women’s clothing (usually a long, dark clergyman’s robe and a wide-brimmed men’s beaver hat), and refused to fit into any box society offered. In a world where women were legally property of their fathers or husbands, here was a person assigned female at birth who answered to no man, owned property, rode horses like a general, and commanded a room of hundreds of devoted followers.

For 18th-century Puritan-descended America, that was infinitely more threatening than a doomsday prophecy. That was a glitch in the simulation.

The Backlash

By the 1780s, the Society of Universal Friends had grown large enough to attract serious government suspicion. Early Americans didn’t have a mental category for a charismatic, gender-bending prophet, so they panicked. Newspapers had a field day. They called the Friend everything from a “heretic wizard” to a “witch” to a “dangerous deceiver.” Mobs would sometimes surround the Friend’s house. There were even attempted assassinations (one person reportedly tried to stone the Friend).

The legal battles were endless. The courts tried to pin the Friend for blasphemy, arguing that claiming to be a messianic figure was a crime. When lawyers asked the Friend to identify as male or female for legal documents, the Friend would simply point to the Bible and say, “I am that I am.”

Rumors swirled constantly. People whispered that the Friend secretly seduced followers (zero evidence of this… the group was famously celibate). Others insisted the Friend claimed to be immortal (also no evidence, but it made for a good story). Yet, despite the mockery and constant surveillance, the movement kept growing. Why? Because the message resonated with people who felt squeezed by the rigid, unforgiving social structures of the new nation.

The Frontier Utopia That Actually Worked (For a While)

Eventually, the pressure became too much. In 1788, the Friend led the followers west into the wilderness of what is now New York’s Finger Lakes region—specifically Keuka Lake. At the time, this was the wild frontier, far away from the prying eyes of Philadelphia and Boston. There, the group built a settlement they unsubtly named Jerusalem. They established communal farms, grist mills, and meeting houses. They lived the peaceful, orderly life they believed God demanded. And here is the wildest part: it worked.

What ultimately brought the movement down wasn’t anything dramatic or violent. It was just the slow, boring erosion of time. Land disputes with neighbors chipped away at their territory. The Friend’s health began to fail. And, eventually, the Public Universal Friend died in 1819. So, the followers entered a strange limbo. Because how do you acknowledge the death of someone who insisted they weren’t even “alive” in the human sense?

They didn’t declare the Friend dead—they announced that the spirit had simply “left the tabernacle” (the body). In a final act of devotion (or secrecy), they took the body and buried it in a hidden grave on the property. No marker. No ceremony. No headstone. They refused to acknowledge the name “Jemima Wilkinson” even in death. To this day, nobody knows exactly where the first American cult leader is buried. And just like that, the movement quietly dissolved.