George J. Adams

George Jones Adams ( – May 11, 1880) was the leader of a schismatic Latter Day Saint sect who led an ill-fated effort to establish a colony of Americans in Palestine. Adams was also briefly a member of the First Presidency in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Strangite). In preparation for colonizing Palestine, he changed his name to George Washington Joshua Adams, to tie himself to two well-known country builders: George Washington of the United States and Joshua, from the Hebrew Bible.

Conversion and early church service George Jones Adams was born in Oxford, New Jersey of Welsh descent. By the 1830s, he had been trained as a Methodist preacher and was a merchant tailor. He was also an aspiring Shakespearean actor, but had little success in being cast in roles.

While traveling from Boston to New York City in February 1840, George, and his wife Caroline Adams, heard the preaching of Latter Day Saint apostle Heber C. Kimball, and were baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints the same week. Within a month he had become an elder in the church. In the spring/summer of 1840, the Brooklyn Branch was organized with him as branch president in New York City, NY (HC, 4:22). In 1841, Adams traveled to England as a missionary for the church; he was successful in winning numerous converts and stayed in England for eighteen months. Adams returned from England with a one-year-old son, George Oscar; his wife Caroline would raise the boy as her own.

In October 1843, church president Joseph Smith asked Adams to travel with apostle Orson Hyde as a missionary to Russia. In 1844, Smith invited Adams to join the exclusive Council of Fifty. On June 7, 1844, Smith set apart Adams "to be an apostle and special witness ... to the empire of Russia", in preparation for the Mormon political kingdom. However, just prior to Adams' planned departure later that month, all church political efforts were suspended after Smith was killed and the church was thrown into turmoil. Adams returned to New England as a regular missionary, and, along with William Smith, Joseph Smith's surviving brother, After migrating around the Northeast for some years, Adams settled in Indian River, Maine, and prophesied that the prerequisite the Second Coming was "the Jews' restoration to Palestine." This and the climate, the insecure and arbitrary treatment by the Ottoman authorities, made many colonists willing to return to Maine.

But their leader Adams withheld their money, which the colonists had earlier conveyed to him. So the missionary Peter Metzler of the Protestant mission in Jaffa bought the land of five colonists, providing them the funds to leave. Adams was drinking heavily at the time and had lost his control over the colonists. In April, a group of colonists appealed to the American consul to the Ottoman Empire for assistance in returning to America. By the end of the month, the U.S. government had arranged for 26 settlers to return. By the end of summer, after the colony's crop harvest was a disastrous failure, only Adams and 40 other settlers remained. By October 1867, the U.S. State Department had appropriated $3000 for the return of any of the remaining colonists who wished to leave Palestine, while by December 1867, the colony had run out of money and resources.

Some of the colonists traveled back to America on the ship Quaker City; Mark Twain was a passenger on the same journey and he wrote about the failed settlers in his 1869 book The Innocents Abroad. Upon returning to the United States, many of Adams' former followers joined the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In June 1868, Adams and his wife left Palestine and sailed to England. Twenty of the original colonists remained in Palestine, some of them permanently.

The colonists who left would sell much of their real estate in the colony to newly arriving settlers, called Templers, coming from Württemberg in 1869. On 5 March 1869 also Metzler sold most of his real estate to the new colonists, thus Adams City became later known as the German Colony of Jaffa.

Return to America and death Although Adams preached briefly in Liverpool and tried to raise followers for a second attempt at settling Palestine, he had returned to America by 1870. He preached in Philadelphia and in 1873 opened a "Church of the Messiah" building for Sunday sermons. When confronted on his past exploits by former followers or others, Adams would deny his identity and past. He died in Philadelphia of "typhoid pneumonia". His son, Clarence A. Adams, was a Baptist clergyman in Pennsylvania until his death in the 1920s.