Bernard Coffindaffer and his crosses, 40-year faith project | Religion

By the time Coffindaffer died of a heart attack nine years later at age 68, he had spent nearly $3 million of his own money raising 1,842 identical cross clusters in 29 states, from New York to Arizona, as well as in Zambia and the Philippines. Most of the clusters were placed at eye-catching rural roadside sites, or overlooking family cemeteries or churches.

Coffindaffer’s cross cluster crusade came about following an epiphany he said he experienced while recuperating from open-heart surgery at Duke University Medical Center in 1982.

“He said the spirit of the Lord came to him and told him to give up all his worldly possessions and let people know that Christ died for their sins,” said daughter Michele Coffindaffer, of Charleston.

“I was six then. It was a pretty big surprise to me,” Michele Coffindaffer said. “I mean, he went to church, but I didn’t expect something like that to happen. But he was like a different person after the heart operation.”

In a 1987 Washington Post Magazine interview, Coffindaffer said he was told to build the crosses through “the authority of the voice of God,” spoken to him “in a language not uttered by a human voice,” giving him detailed instructions on how to proceed with his cross-building mission, right down to the size and colors the crosses should be.

Coffindaffer’s widow, June Coffindaffer Toler, now 87 and living in Charleston, said she, too, was unprepared for her husband’s epiphany. “But I supported him and wanted him to do what God wanted him to do,” she said.

A native of Craigsville, Nicholas County, Coffindaffer spent his early years growing up in a coal camp, according to his daughter. In 1935, Coffindaffer’s mother died, leaving him, at age 10, an orphan, along with a brother and a sister.

“His sister tried to play mom for a while, but he went from aunt to aunt until he had grown enough to pass for being old enough to join the Marines, which he did at age 15,” Michele Coffindaffer said.

Coffindaffer served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1940-46, and took part in the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II, rising to the rank of staff sergeant. After the war, Coffindaffer attended Morris Harvey College, now the University of Charleston, on the G.I. Bill, graduating with a degree in business administration.

After graduation, Coffindaffer spent most of the next 25 years living in and around Charleston. According to Charleston City Directories for that era, he first worked as a bookkeeper and advertising manager for Elk Refining. He then worked for — and eventually became president of — Craigsville Distributing, a mining supply company.

According to his daughter, Coffindaffer also worked as a sportscaster for a Charleston area radio station and operated a movie theater in Marmet that provided in-house child care, allowing married couples to view movies without distraction.

He and his first wife, Helen, divorced in 1966. The following year, Coffindaffer embraced Christianity. In 1976, he married his second wife, June Woodrum, a nurse and Michele’s mother.

“They met in Charleston and moved to Craigsville, where Dad bought the old family farm and started making it beautiful again, with an orchard, flowers, a windmill and a big pond,” Michele Coffindaffer said. “It was a source of pride for him.”

“He was funny and friendly and a good salesperson,” said June Coffindaffer Toler.

In the late 1970s, Coffindaffer founded and began operating Gauley Industries, a venture that milled magnetite for use in a process to remove impurities from coal, at a plant in Camden-on-Gauley.

Gauley Industries and other Coffindaffer enterprises proved successful enough to make the Craigsville native a millionaire several times over.

After selling his magnetite mill, Coffindaffer served as a Methodist lay minister, pastoring several small churches in Pocahontas County. “He also helped churches repair their steeples,” according to daughter Michele.

Michele, the youngest of Coffindaffer’s children, was among those present for the raising of the first cross cluster at Flatwoods in 1984, but she remembers little of that event. At that time, the crosses were visible from Interstate 79, but they are now obscured from the highway by brush and trees, though still visible from the Flatwoods shopping mall.

Later, she said, “I was on the road with Dad a lot, checking out places to put the crosses and then helping to put the crosses up after he got permission from the landowners,” and later taking part in cross cluster installation ceremonies, which included prayers, singing and a consecration rite involving water Coffindaffer brought back from the River Jordan during a trip to the Middle East.

At the time, Michele did not share her father’s fervor for the project.

“When you think with the mind of a child and people don’t explain things to you, I didn’t understand what was going on with Dad. He traveled all around the country with the crosses — I don’t know when he rested. When I went along [but] I hated it. He was manic all the time. I was embarrassed. He wasn’t like my friends’ parents.”

During the nine-year period in which he installed cross clusters at sites across the nation, Coffindaffer made several trips to the Holy Land, where he prospected for oil.

“Dad wanted to strike it rich and give all the money to the children of Israel,” his daughter said.

It was one entrepreneurial venture in which Coffindaffer was unsuccessful.

At the peak of Coffindaffer’s activity, he employed seven full-time crews to install and paint his “crosses of mercy,” as he called them, fabricated from utility poles imported from a California supplier. 

As intended, thousands of cross clusters spread from West Virginia (where more than 350 were planted), across the Appalachian landscape and beyond. With all the displays visible from roads, millions of drivers and passengers took notice and Coffindaffer’s work became well-known. 

Coffindaffer was interviewed by the Washington Post and CBS Sunday Morning — along with dozens of other local and regional news outlets — and was the subject of a PBS “Different Drummer” series documentary.

Photographer Frank “Tico” Herrera was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to document the effect of the cross clusters on the rural landscape, which produced the traveling exhibit “Cross Reference,” shown at galleries across the nation.

In the 1991 movie “The Silence of the Lambs,” a Coffindaffer Cross Cluster appears in the background of a sketch that film villain Hannibal Lecter drew of fictional West Virginia-born film protagonist Clarice Starling — played by Jodie Fisher — holding a lamb on a pastoral Mountain State hillside.

As more cross clusters began to appear across Appalachia, reaction was mixed. Hundreds of landowners contacted Coffindaffer, offering their land as settings for new installations, while others complained that the crosses had become ubiquitous and detracted from the region’s natural beauty.

“It’s impossible to view the area where the Kanawha, New and Gauley Rivers come together without being reminded of God’s presence and majesty,” wrote one subscriber in a 1986 letter to the editor of the Charleston Gazette. “Mr. Coffindaffer’s blue and yellow crosses simply distract from this wonder.”

But Herrera, a Beckley native who taught photography at Shepherd University and the Corcoran School of Art and Design at Georgetown University (and who died in 2021), had said he considered Coffindaffer’s installations to be examples of public art.

David Pittenger, who operates a fine arts photo studio in Huntington and is a psychology professor at Marshall University, agrees.

“I understand public art as something that draws attention to itself and its surroundings. It defines or re-defines its setting,” Pittenger wrote in his 2018 book, “Mr. Coffindaffer’s Crosses: A Study in Public Art,” which includes his images of 55 cross installations. 

“Each cross installation — identical for all practical purposes — gives a sense of meaning to the surrounding area,” Pittenger said in an interview earlier this week. “If the installation overlooks a family cemetery, it makes you think of the generations of people who lived there. If it’s on the edge of a cliff it makes you wonder how those who installed it managed to climb the hill and drill through the stone to erect the crosses.”

Pittenger said his initial response to the cross clusters, glimpsed in passing from highways in the late the late 1980s and early 1990s, was not positive. At first, he said, he saw the crosses as “uninvited intrusions of someone’s religion into my life.”

But that sentiment began to change over the years, he said, particularly after getting stuck in gridlocked Interstate 64 traffic near Milton one day nearly 10 years ago. There, he found himself across the road from a Coffindaffer Cluster in a grassy field at the base of a hill, surrounded by a white wooden fence with an open gate, with plenty of time available to contemplate the scene.

“I was sitting there, bored as can be, when I started to realize there was a story being told by that scene,” he said. “Why was the gate open? Why were the crosses so well-maintained? I found it interesting and began to drive around, looking for more of the cross clusters.”

One of the challenges of appreciating the cross clusters as works of art is that they are most often viewed by people speeding past them while driving, according to Pittenger.

“Taking the time to look at the crosses through the viewfinder of my camera has allowed me to better understand and appreciate their art form,” he said.

As the number of cross clusters grew, Coffindaffer’s fortune shrank, and soon affected his family.

“Mom had quit working at the magnetite mill when she was pregnant with me. But she had to go back to work when I was eight,” Michele Coffindaffer said. “She worked nights as a nurse and slept during the day. Dad was a good man, but we weren’t at the top of his priority list. And at the time, I resented it.”

For nine years, Coffindaffer crisscrossed the nation, scouting out sites for new clusters, obtaining agreements from landowners and overseeing installations.

“In all of creation, I have put up more crosses than any man,” Coffindaffer said in a 1993 interview with CBS Sunday Morning. He said he intended to erect many more.

Coffindaffer told the news program’s interviewer, Bill Geist, he would soon focus his cross-raising program on New York City, Los Angeles and other urban centers, “where the tough people live.”

But first he needed to raise some money, he said. 

“I’ve cashed in my life insurance,” he said. “I cashed in my retirement plan. I cashed in anything I could cash.” 

Coffindaffer never got the chance to move forward with his big-city cross-building plan.

On Oct. 8, 1993, two days before the CBS Sunday Morning segment was originally scheduled to air, Coffindaffer died at his Craigsville home of a heart attack.

His one-time fortune depleted, a cross cluster he erected the previous month near Ozark, Alabama, would turn out to be his last.

At the end of the CBS interview, Coffindaffer was asked why he thought he was called upon to launch his cross-building crusade.

“Because the Lord loves me that much,” he responded. “Absolutely. I know that’s true.”

“People have said that he could have spent the money better by feeding a lot of people or helping the homeless or lots of other things,” Michele Coffindaffer said. “But this is what he believed God told him to do, and he did it with all the energy, time and money he could. He tried his best to be the man God wanted him to be.”

And often, seeing Coffindaffer’s crosses on the landscape created profound positive effects.

“We got tons of letters from people saying his work made a big difference in their lives,” June Coffindaffer Toler said.

“I remember a letter he got from a man who said his wife was divorcing him and he was thinking of suicide until he saw the crosses and realized that he was loved and that life had meaning and was worth living,” Michele Coffindaffer said. “There was story after story like that.”

Now, 40 years after the first Coffindaffer cross cluster became a part of the West Virginia landscape, “many of the crosses are not looking very good,” June Coffindaffer Toler said.

Crosses Across America, a nonprofit based in Vicksburg, Miss., was formed in 1999 with the intention of carrying on Coffindaffer’s work. Its goal, according to its website, is to locate and refurbish all existing clusters and install new ones at 50 mile intervals along the nation’s interstate highway system.

Much of the organization’s work has taken place in the Deep South, although its Facebook page documents restoring or installing a small number of clusters in Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

“Instead of installing new crosses, I think they should focus on those that are already up,” Michele Coffindaffer said. “They are one of the things West Virginia is known for.” At the rate the crosses are declining, she said, “there may not be enough around to celebrate a 50th anniversary.”

Recent calls to Crosses Across America and its director were unanswered.

As to the man inspired to spend nine years and his life’s fortune building the crosses, Michele Coffindaffer said it took until she was in her 20s to understand her father’s fervor and make peace with his memory.

“He tried his absolute best to be the man God wanted him to be,” she said. “He was a good, decent and loving person.”

June Coffindaffer Toler said she wants her former husband to be remembered for “trying to do what God wanted him to do, with all of his heart. He was not a halfway person.”