Soaring 11 stories above southern Illinois' highest point, the Bald Knob Cross of Peace has been billed as a towering testament to goodwill.
But peace and goodwill have been scarce lately on the board that administers the 43-year-old landmark about 130 miles southeast of St. Louis.
Newer members of the 18-person board accuse their veteran counterparts of taking the not-for-profit site for granted, with little regard for God or financial stewardship. They suspect that the former treasurer – daughter of one of the site's founders – misused donated funds, something she flatly denies.
Those who have been on the board longer, many of them descendants of the farmers who a half-century ago hatched the idea for the cross on the 32-acre site, counter that newer folks on the panel are intent on hijacking the landmark.
Today, the site collects money chiefly through donations from visitors to the landmark, though its annual income is unclear. The new guard on the board feels that the former leaders' way of doing business was slipshod, with wasteful spending and loans to individual board members conspiring to make a clear financial picture impossible.
Amid the rancor, the cross is showing its age – many of its panels are rusting, missing or simply attached by coat hangars and bailing wire.
Words inscribed on the cross's concrete base embody principles the infighting seems to have swept away: Faith. Hope. Charity. Peace.
"I'm embarrassed to tell people that my dad was one of the founders of that cross, given the point that it has got to," said Myra Owens, a 13-year board member from Centralia and a sister of Tirzah Tweedy, the woman accused of misappropriations. "It is very sad we have people who have come in over the past four years and really have tried to run everything."
She points to Steve Babb, who has butted heads with Tweedy and pressed for reforms since becoming board president in February at the head of a 10-person majority.
"Our motives are to return that piece of property to the intent of the founding members – to have a free, safe place where Christians of all denominations could come to praise, honor and glorify the Lord – and to establish accountability in everything we do up there," said Babb, a former Marine and state administrator who's been on the board since October 2004.
There were times of greater unity on Bald Knob Mountain, elevation 1,025 feet.
Worshipping there dates to the mid-1930s, when rural mail carrier Wayman Presley and pastor William Lirely – the father of Tweedy and Owens – began talking of a nondenominational "united worship" atop a hill with a breathtaking view.
The first Easter service there – now a yearly tradition – was held in 1937. Presley and Lirely envisioned a huge cross that would be visible for miles and serve as testament to faith year-round.
So began a fundraising campaign that took decades, with a huge boost coming in 1955 when Presley was featured on television's "This is Your Life." Donations poured in. Schoolchildren and Sunday school classes collected coins for the cross.
A widow named Myrta Clutts called the cross "the greatest idea I'd ever heard" – so much so she pledged $100 to the project when she didn't have $10 to spare. Clutts considered her pig Betsy an instrument of God when the animal gave birth to 21 piglets, three times the normal litter. She sold 14 of the pigs, paid her $100 pledge and had $400 left to pay her bills. Continue >>
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