On the eve of the Twentieth Century, a series of events and circumstances brought about a small, but significant religious revolution in the area along the Upper Forks of the Satilla River, in southeastern Georgia. There, in the Summer of 1899, two young men, clad in black dress suits and derby hats, arrived in Coffee County, walking with purpose and zeal, like men on a mission. The searing white sands were too dry for anything other than pine trees and wiregrass to grow in abundance, but the region would soon become a fruitful field for their unique faith, producing several branches of their relatively new, but prolific church. From the seeds of their efforts, despite parched conditions, poverty, and persecution, grew a uniquely peculiar  feature of the cultural landscape in the Wiregrass South: a cluster of large and thriving Mormon communities, with several organized congregations in rural, rugged, remote South Georgia.

 

At a time when no organization of Latter-day Saints existed in the cosmopolitan expanse of greater Atlanta, two sizeable Mormon congregations were flourishing in the  faraway wilderness of Coffee  County. They were named Cumorah  and  Utah, honoring the faith's birthplace in the east, and it's heartland in the west. Today, though their original names and meetinghouses are gone, the Cumorah and Utah congregations — now the Douglas Wards and Pearson Ward, respectively — have been continuously active since their formations, and are among the oldest established units of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the State of Georgia.

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