Shirley Nelson collection of Shiloh material

Shirley Nelson, whose parents grew up in the Shiloh community, is the author of Fair, Clear and Terrible: The Story of Shiloh, and is the compiler of this collection of material related to Frank Weston Sandford and his Shiloh sectarian community which flourished at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Frank Weston Sandford was born on October 2, 1862, in Bowdoinham, Maine. In 1882, he entered Bates College and was a star player on the baseball team. After graduating in June 1886, Sandford entered the Maine State Seminary in September, having decided to pass up offers to play professional baseball. However, he stayed there for only three months and on New Years' Day 1887, Sandford was ordained a Freewill Baptist minister.

Sandford preached in several towns in his area until 1893, when he resigned his pastorate and became an independent evangelist. He soon founded The Kingdom as an evangelistic, apocalyptic Christian movement. A few years later, in 1896, Sandford and several others began construction of a Bible school in Durham, Maine, called Shiloh. Shiloh would eventually grow into a self-contained town of over 600 people.

The Kingdom sought to prepare the world through prayer for Christ's second coming. As a means of doing this, Sandford and some of his followers made the first of several voyages around the world on the schooner Coronet in 1907. Following a voyage in 1911, on which several of his crew died from scurvy and starvation, Sandford was convicted of causing death at sea and served nearly seven years in the Federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. Although the Shiloh community ended shortly after his release, Sandford continued to lead his followers while in strict seclusion until his death in March 1948.

Most of the Shiloh complex is gone today. However, The Kingdom still maintains a headquarters, now located in Dublin, New Hampshire, and has approximately 2,000 members nationwide.