In the mid-1960s, Jones moved his small congregation to Northern California, settling first in Redwood Valley in Mendocino County. His congregation was racially integrated, something unusual at the time for a Midwestern church. Jones opened his first Peoples Temple church in Indianapolis in the mid-1950s. A stone memorial to the Jonestown victims was unveiled at the cemetery in 2008. In order to raise money to start a church of his own, the charismatic Jones tried various ventures, including selling live monkeys door-to-door.ĭid you know? More than 400 unclaimed bodies from the Jonestown tragedy are buried at the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California, where many of Jim Jones' followers were from. In the early 1950s, he began working as a self-ordained Christian minister in small churches around Indianapolis. Jones was born on May 13, 1931, in rural Indiana. The megalomaniacal man behind the tragedy, Jim Jones, came from humble beginnings. civilian lives in a non-natural disaster. Prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the tragedy at Jonestown marked the single largest loss of U.S.
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