San Juan Record.
An independent, non-partisan paper promoting the interests of its readers thru sponsoring Truth as the keynote in all human relations / In the Center of the Greatest Non-Irrigated Farming Country in the Entire West
1934--1949 Weekly
Monticello, San Juan County, UT.
Editor: Marie M. Ogden, proprietor and editor, Elmer Peshak, assistant manager.
Corporate author: Home of Truth Colony / The Ogden Center 18/-, May 1934-1949.
$2.00 a year.

This was a typical eight-page rural newspaper of the period, replete with local events and world news from the national news services, notes of the meetings of the Grazing Board and 4-H Club, accounts of days of yore by "The Old Settler," snippets from serialized novels (including stories by Zane Grey), advice from Emily Post, comics, uplifting poetry, and the like. Marie Margaret Matilda Schneider Ogden (1883-1975) acquired the paper in May 1934 and largely left it unchanged except for the addition of her irregular "The Rebirth of a Soul," "Home of Truth" and "These Changing Times" columns which reported on and proselytized for her Home of Truth utopian and millenarian settlement in Dry Valley, San Juan County, Utah, that she had started when she fled the east coast and the imminent apocalyptic destruction of civilization. Ogden had been a fairly typical matron in Newark, New Jersey, until the death of her husband in 1929 when she to turned to the search for "TRUTH" through the study of astrology, numerology and the like. These interests were focused for her the next year when she became acquainted with the work of William Dudley Pelley, whose "Seven Minutes in Eternity" had been published in 1929. She supported Pelley financially (although they later disagreed and separated in 1932 over whether the money was a gift or a loan) and started a Truth Center in Newark to study Pelley's work. After their split, Ogden, who had come to realize that she was the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, founded her own School of Truth in Newark, expounding on the messages she was receiving by automatic writing on her typewriter from the "Unseen Realms." These foretold the imminent coming of the New Order and the arrival of the Kingdom of God through the reincarnation of many individuals who in earlier births had been disciples of the Master Jesus, and would be preceded by the imminent destruction of the present society. To survive this time of trials, she and her few disciples moved to a ranch in southern Utah (whither she was directed by spirit influence) and began the Home of Truth settlement where they could await -- and survive -- the coming time of cataclysms that would precede the New Order. In May 1934 she took over this journal. Ogden, along with a wide swath of New Thought teachers, believed in physical immortality -- the possibility of overcoming death and living on in the physical body -- and the colony's inevitable dissolution began with the mocking publicity attendant on Ogden's keeping the body of a deceased follower (the wife of the assistant editor of the journal) in her home for two years, injecting it with secret foods and fluids while awaiting revival and regeneration as long as the corpse displayed the "silver cord" that bound her to life. Ogden's columns in the journal regularly describe her acquaintance and interaction with the likes of William Kullgren, Harry Gardner, Wing Anderson, George and Louise Brownell, et al. University of Utah; Utah State University.

In the Ephemera Wing, we have collected the fragments of Ogden's The Rebirth of a Soul scattered through the Record into a single PDF for ease of reading. Due entirely to Ogden's page layoput decisions, that document also contains substantial portions of Ernest Palmer's Lift Up Your Head, a lost work of theoretical Egyptology. For a time, Palmer was a staff writer for Ogden, before moving to Tennessee to farm, and to write folksy notes for publication in the Record.

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