But this story is all true. . . and it happened a century ago!
Corvallis, Oregon leaders weren't terribly impressed with the Salvation Army dropout who appeared in the community in the early 1900s and announced plans to start a new church. While Edmund Creffield may have been unremarkable in the eyes of the city fathers, he became something else to many of the city mothers and daughters.
When Creffield and his "Holy Roller" religious cult made headlines in Oregon in 1903, it was page-one news -- not just in the Pacific Northwest, but around the country. Yet few people in Oregon and Washington today have heard Creffield's name or his story. And the descendants of the people who were involved still refuse to talk about those events 100 years ago.
Robert B. Blodgett spent years sifting through newspaper archives in Washington and Oregon, piecing together the story of Edmund Creffield. Theres