The Feral Jennings Brothers — Raised Daughters Only to Wed Them Later (1889 Missouri)

In the spring of 1983, a demolition crew tearing down an abandoned farmhouse outside of Possi, Missouri, found something behind a false wall in the root cellar. It was a leather bound ledger, water stained and fragile, containing what appeared to be a family registry, but the names didn’t make sense.
Daughters listed as wives, fathers listed twice, birth years that made certain marriages impossible. The county clerk who examined it later said the handwriting belonged to a man named Cyrus Jennings and that the last entry was dated 1894. She also said the ledger should have been burned, that some records aren’t meant to be kept.
When asked why, she closed the book and said only this because it proves they knew what they were doing. Hello everyone. Before we start, make sure to like and subscribe to the channel and leave a comment with where you’re watching from and what time it is there. That way, YouTube will keep showing you stories just like this one.
The Jennings brothers came to Washington County, Missouri sometime in the winter of 1886. Cyrus was 31. His younger brother, Micah, was 28. They purchased 67 acres of timber and bottomland along the Big River, paid in cash, and built a cabin large enough for two families, though neither man had a wife.
The deed was filed in February. By October, both men were married. The brides were sisters brought in from somewhere south, maybe Arkansas, maybe Tennessee. No one remembered their maiden names. They were recorded only as Sarah Jennings and Abigail Jennings, wives of Cyrus and Micah, respectively. They were 15 and 14 years old.
What happened over the next 8 years has been debated, dismissed, and buried by nearly everyone who encountered it. There were no arrests, no trial, no public scandal. But there were whispers, and there was that ledger. And there were the daughters, four of them, born between 1887 and 1891, raised in that house by the river, taught to read using only the Bible, never sent to school, never seen in town, and according to the registry found in that cellar.
Each one of them, upon reaching the age of 14, was married to the man who had raised her since birth. The land they chose was not accidental. The Jennings property sat in a crook of the big river where the valley narrowed and the hills rose steep on both sides. In winter, the sun barely touched the cabin until noon.
In summer, the humidity gathered thick as wool. It was the kind of place where sound didn’t travel right. Neighbors said you could fire a rifle and hear nothing a quarter mile away. The forest swallowed everything, and the nearest homestead was 2 mi up river, owned by a French trapper named Bou, who kept to himself and spoke little English.

It was perfect isolation, the kind you had to seek deliberately, Cyrus Jennings was described by the few who met him as a man of unusual conviction. Tall, lean, with a black beard he kept trimmed close, and eyes that never wandered when he spoke. He bought supplies in Possi twice a year, always paid in silver coin, and never lingered for conversation.
The store owner, a man named Virgil Puit, later told a county deputy that Cyrus spoke like a preacher, but never mentioned a church. That he once bought four identical dresses, all the same size, all brown cotton. And when asked if he had daughters, Cyrus replied, “I have what the Lord has given me to steward.
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” Puit said he didn’t ask again. Micah, the younger brother, was seen even less, only twice in 8 years. Once in 1888, when he came to town with a broken hand wrapped in linen, and once in 1892 to file a birth record for a daughter. He was quieter than Cyrus, softer in the face. But there was something wounded about him, Puit said. Something that made you feel sorry for him until you remembered he’d chosen to live out there, that he’d chosen everything that followed.
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The wives Sarah and Abigail were never seen in public after their marriage. Not once, no church, no market, no social calls. In 8 years, not a single person outside the family claimed to have spoken to them. And when a Methodist circuit preacher tried to visit the property in 1889, he was met at the treeine by Cyrus holding a shotgun and told that his ministry was not welcome, that the Jennings family served God in their own covenant, and that no man should come between a father and his house.
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The preacher left. He never returned. Years later, he would say he regretted that. The first daughter was born in May of 1887. Her name was Mercy. The second came in 1888. Her name was Prudence. Then came Constants in 1890 and finally Faith in 1891. Four girls, all delivered at home, all recorded in the county register by their fathers, but never baptized in any church.
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The birth records listed the mothers, but the mothers never signed them. Only Cyrus did. His handwriting, his authority. When the county clerk, a woman named Mrs. Ida Turnbull asked why the mothers had not signed. Cyrus told her that women in his household did not make marks on government paper, that it was his duty to speak for them before the law, as it was before God. Mrs.
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Turnbull remembered mercy. She was brought into town once in the fall of 1893, riding in the back of a wagon beside her father. She was 6 years old, thin, pale, with dark hair cut blunt across her forehead. She wore one of those brown dresses. She did not speak. She did not look at anyone. Mrs. Turnbull said she tried to smile at the girl to offer her a peppermint candy, but Mercy only stared at her lap.
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Cyrus took the candy and handed it back. He said his daughters were not permitted sweets, that the flesh must be disciplined early or it would lead the spirit into confusion. Mrs. Turnbull said she watched them leave and felt cold the rest of that day, though it was nearly 70°. What the daughters were taught, we can only guess, but the ledger provides some insight.
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Inside it, in careful script, Cyrus had written what he called the covenants of the household. There were 12 rules. Among them, that daughters were to obey their fathers in all things until marriage. That marriage was a transfer of covenant, not a breaking of blood, that a man who raised a daughter in righteousness had first claimed to her purity, for he alone understood her spirit.
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That marriage outside the family was a surrender to the world and the world was governed by Satan. And finally, this line underlined twice. The line must remain unbroken or the covenant is void and the house falls to ruin. It was a theology of possession, a belief system that justified what cannot be justified. And it was written down, not hidden, not coded.
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Cyrus believed it so deeply that he recorded it as truth, as law, as divine instruction. He signed his name beneath it, and below his signature in smaller, shakier script. Micah had signed as well. The ledger listed Mercy’s marriage in the spring of 191. She was 14 years old. The groom was listed as Cyrus Jennings, her father.
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There was no ceremony recorded, no witness named, only the date written in that same careful hand. And beside it, a single notation, covenant fulfilled. 3 months later, a birth was recorded, a son, stillborn, buried on the property. No name given, just a small cross carved with the year, found decades later when the land was surveyed for timber rights.
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Prudence was married in 1899, according to the ledger. Though no legal marriage certificate was ever filed with the county, her husband was listed as Micah Jennings, her uncle. She was 13. The entry included a Bible verse, Proverbs 3:es 5 and 6. Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding.
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Beneath it, in what appeared to be a different pen, someone had written. She wept, but she obeyed. Constance and Faith followed in 194 and 195, both to their father, both at 14. The ledger stopped making full entries after that. There were only initials, dates, short phrases like union blessed and seed planted. But there was one final page dated March of 196 written in a hand that was not Cyrus’s.
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It was rougher, more slanted, possibly Micah’s. It said only this. Sarah is gone. Abigail will not eat. The girls do not speak anymore. I think we have done something the Lord will not forgive. But Cyrus says, “We cannot stop now.” He says, “If we stop, it means we never believed.
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And if we never believed, then it was only sin. He cannot allow it to be only sin.” That same year, a neighbor, a man named Thomas Drury, reported to the county sheriff that he had not seen smoke from the Jennings property in over 2 weeks. that the animals sounded distressed, that he had called out from the road and received no answer.
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The sheriff, a man named Bill Hackett, rode out with a deputy in late March. They found the cabin door open. Inside, the air was cold and stale. There was no fire in the hearth, no food on the table, the beds were made, the floors were swept, but there was no one there. They searched the property. In the root cellar, they found preserved vegetables, salted meat, and a trunk containing women’s clothing.
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In the barn, they found two cows dead in their stalls, starved. And in the woods, about 30 yards from the cabin, they found a row of graves, seven of them, unmarked except for wooden crosses. The sheriff did not dig them up. He filed a report listing the family as missing. He closed the file 6 months later. No investigation followed.
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It was not until 1957 that anyone looked at the Jennings case again. A graduate student from the University of Missouri, researching frontier marriage practices for his thesis, came across the birth records in the Washington County archives. He noticed the pattern, the same surnames, the ages, the lack of witnesses. He requested access to property records, tax filings, anything connected to the family.
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That is when he found the sheriff’s report from 196. And that is when he started asking questions no one wanted to answer. His name was Martin Cole. He interviewed 12 people who had been alive during the Jennings era. Most refused to speak. Two admitted they had heard stories but insisted they were exaggerations.
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One woman, the daughter of the store owner Virgil Puit, said her father had told her before he died that Cyrus Jennings was the most dangerous kind of man, one who believed his own righteousness so fully that he could not see his own evil. She said her father burned every receipt, every record of sale to the Jennings family because he did not want his name attached to what happened in that house.
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Martin Cole never finished his thesis. But he did locate one living witness, a woman named Constance Rock, living in a Catholic charity home in Street Louie. She was 71 years old, blind in one eye. She had been admitted to the home in 1938 with no family, no history, and a stated age that did not match her appearance.
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When Martin asked if she had ever heard of the Jennings family, she went silent for nearly a minute. Then she said, “I was Constance Jennings. I have not spoken that name in 50 years. If you’re still watching, you’re already braver than most. Tell us in the comments what would you have done if this was your family.
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” She told Martin that she did not remember much of her childhood, that her mind had hidden it from her. But she remembered the cabin. She remembered her mother, Abigail, who stopped speaking when Constance was seven. She remembered her father, Micah, who cried in the barn and told her once that he had made a terrible mistake, but could not undo it without destroying his brother.
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And she remembered her uncle Cyrus who read scripture every night and told the girls that they had been born for a holy purpose, that the world outside was corrupt, that only within the family could they remain pure, that their bodies belonged first to God, then to him. She said she ran away in 197 when she was 17, that she walked through the woods for 2 days until she reached the main road, and that a farmer’s wife found her and took her in.
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She said she never told anyone what had happened, that she changed her name, that she tried to forget, but she said the nightmares never stopped. And she said this, which Martin wrote down word for word. My father was not evil. My uncle was. And that is worse. Because evil knows what it is. But my uncle believed he was righteous.
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And belief like that does not die. It only waits. When the demolition crew found the ledger in 1983, they also found something else. Tucked between the final pages was a folded piece of paper, brittle and brown with age. It was a letter, unsigned, undated, written in a shaking hand that did not match any other writing in the book.
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The county cler who examined it believed it was written by one of the wives, possibly Sarah, possibly Abigail. The ink had bled in places as though water had touched the page, or tears. The letter was never made public, but a transcript exists in the County Historical Society’s restricted files. It has been read by fewer than a dozen people. It begins like this.
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I thought I was being saved. I thought he was giving me a home. I was 15 and I had no mother. And he said I would be cared for. He said I would be a wife and then a mother and that those were the only roles a woman needed. I believed him. I believed him until I understood what he meant by keeping the line pure, and by then I had already given him two daughters.
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The letter continued for three pages. It described a household governed by absolute control. Meals taken in silence. Scripture read aloud for hours. The daughters taught to sew, to cook, to clean, but never taught to read beyond the Bible. Never given shoes unless the ground was frozen. Never allowed to sing unless it was a hymn.
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The letter described how Cyrus would inspect the girls every Sunday morning. How he would check their hands for dirt, their hair for tangles, their dresses for stains, how he told them that cleanliness was godliness, and that a disobedient daughter was a mark against her father’s soul.
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And then the letter described what happened when mercy turned 14. How Cyrus gathered the family in the main room and read from Genesis, the passage where Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac. How he said that obedience to God requires the surrender of what we love most. How he told mercy that she had been raised for him, that her purity belonged to him and that their union was sanctified by blood and belief.
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The letter said that Mercy did not understand that she cried, that she asked her mother to explain. And the letter said this, I could not speak. I tried. My mouth opened but my throat had closed. Micah looked at me. He looked at me and I saw that he knew that he had always known and he said nothing. He did nothing.
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And I hated him more than I hated Cyrus because Cyrus believed he was right. But Micah knew he was wrong and he let it happen anyway. The letter ended abruptly. The final line read, “If you find this, know that I tried. I tried to take them and run, but he found us at the river. He brought us back. He locked the cellar door and I never tried again. I am still in that cellar.
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I will always be in that cellar. Even when I am dead, no one knows what happened to Sarah or Abigail. Their graves were never identified. The seven crosses found in the woods were eventually removed when the property was sold for timber. The bones, if any, were beneath them, were never exumed. The state decided it was too old, too expensive, too painful. They let it stay buried.
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The cabin was torn down in 1983, but the foundation is still there. You can find it if you know where to look. Off County Road Double J, past the metal gate with the no trespassing sign, down a gravel path that turns to mud when it rains. The big river still runs beside it. The hills still rise on both sides.
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And if you stand where the doorway used to be, you can still feel it. That wrongness, that weight. People who have been there say the air is different, heavier, like the land remembers. In 1991, a developer tried to build a campground on the site. He cleared brush, he poured gravel. He put up a sign.
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Within 3 months, two workers quit, saying they heard children crying in the woods at night. A third said he found a small leather shoe buried near the old root cellar, too small for an adult, too old to belong to anyone living. The developer abandoned the project. The land was sold again in 2003. It has remained empty ever since.
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Constance Ror died in 1964. She left behind no children, no family. The charity home buried her in a Catholic cemetery under the name she had taken, not the name she was born with. Martin Cole published a short article about the Jennings case in a regional history journal in 1960, but it was largely ignored. He died in 2008.
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His research notes were donated to the Missouri Historical Society where they remain in a box labeled unverified frontier accounts. The ledger itself was placed in the Washington County Archives, but sometime in the mid ’90s, it disappeared. No record of its removal exists. No one admits to taking it. Some believe it was destroyed by a cler who thought it was too disturbing to preserve.
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Others believe it was stolen by a descendant of the family, someone who wanted to erase the evidence. But there are those who say it was never meant to be kept in the first place. That some truths are not meant to survive. That some records should burn. Mercy Jennings was never found. Neither was prudence. Neither was faith. There are no death certificates.
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No graves with their names. They simply vanished like their mothers before them. The only one who escaped was Constance and she spent 50 years trying to forget. In her final interview with Martin Cole, she said something he underlined in his notes. She said, “People ask me if I forgive them. I do not.
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People ask me if I understand why they did it. I do not. But I will tell you this. My uncle died believing he was righteous. And that belief gave him peace. And I have never known peace. So you tell me who won. The story of the Jennings family is not taught in schools. It is not mentioned in Missouri history books.
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It exists only in fragments. A ledger that disappeared. A letter that was never published. A testimony from a woman who died 60 years ago. And a foundation in the woods where nothing grows right. But it happened. It happened in 1889, in 191. In 196. It happened in the hills of Missouri in a valley where sound did not travel, where no one came to help, where belief was used as permission, and scripture was used as a weapon.
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And if you drive down County Road Double J on a winter evening, when the fog settles low and the light is failing, you might see it. The place where the cabin stood, the woods where the graves were buried, the river that carried away their voices, and you might feel what others have felt, that some places hold memory, that some sins are too deep to wash clean.
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And that silence in the end is not peace. It is only the sound of something waiting to be spoken. If this story has stayed with you, leave a comment below. Tell us what you think happened to the daughters who were never found. Tell us if you believe some story should stay buried or if the truth, no matter how dark, deserves to be told.
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And if you want more forgotten histories like this, subscribe because there are more. There are always more. Hidden in county records, whispered in mountain towns, carved into sellar doors, waiting for someone brave enough to