Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of George Went Hensley of Scott, Virginia
The story of George Went Hensley begins with uncertainty, which is fitting for a man whose life moved across county lines, church lines, courtrooms, brush arbors, coal towns, and newspaper columns. He has often been listed as born in Scott County, Virginia, on May 2, 1881. Family and cemetery sources repeat that connection. Yet the best scholarly chronology warns that the record is not so simple. Later documents gave different birthplaces, including Scott County, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee, and no official birth record has been found in the vital records searched for Tennessee, Virginia, or West Virginia.
That does not remove Hensley from Appalachian history. It places him deeper inside it. His life followed the old mountain routes from southwest Virginia and upper East Tennessee into Kentucky, Ohio, Georgia, and Florida. His name became tied to one of the most controversial religious practices in the southern mountains, the taking up of serpents in worship. To some followers, he was a preacher who obeyed the words of Mark 16 with absolute seriousness. To newspapers, he became a spectacle. To courts, he became a problem of public safety. To historians, he remains one of the most important figures in the spread of modern Appalachian serpent handling.
The Birthplace Problem
George Went Hensley is usually given a Scott County, Virginia birth connection, but that claim should be handled carefully. Some later records support it, and family history sites and cemetery memorials repeat it. However, Thomas G. Burton, who produced one of the strongest chronologies of Hensley’s life, found conflicting evidence. Burton noted that one child’s record pointed toward Scott County, Virginia, while another pointed toward Tennessee, and another toward West Virginia. He also wrote that no birth record had been found in the vital records of Tennessee, Virginia, or West Virginia.
The strongest conclusion is not that Scott County is wrong. It is that Scott County still needs proof from county records. A birth register, delayed birth record, court record, Bible record, tax record, or other local source from Scott County would be needed before the claim could be treated as settled. Until then, Scott County remains part of the Hensley research trail, not the final word.
Hensley’s parents were Emanuel Hensley and Susan Jane Hensley. Burton found the family in the 1880 United States Census in the Watterson community of Hawkins County, Tennessee. That detail complicates the traditional birth story, but it also reflects a familiar Appalachian pattern. Families moved back and forth through the mountain borderlands of Virginia and Tennessee. County lines mattered on paper, but kinship, work, worship, and migration often crossed them with ease.
From Mountain Poverty to Pentecostal Fire
Hensley grew up in the world of rural Appalachia, where hard labor, religious fervor, and family instability often lived close together. He had little formal education. Burton’s account says family members remembered that he could not read well and may not have been able to read at all. In worship, he depended on others to read Scripture aloud, then preached from memory, rhythm, and conviction.
That oral style mattered. Hensley did not become influential because he wrote theology. He became influential because he could stand before people and make a verse feel immediate. In the Holiness and Pentecostal world of the early twentieth century, the signs of the Spirit were not treated as distant memories. Speaking in tongues, healing, casting out devils, and divine deliverance were preached as living realities. Hensley pushed that logic to its most dangerous edge.
The verse that defined him came from the longer ending of the Gospel of Mark. It said that signs would follow believers, including the taking up of serpents. Many Christians read the passage as a description of apostolic wonders. Hensley read it as a command. If the Bible said believers would take up serpents, then he believed the faithful should do it.
Rainbow Rock and the First Serpent
The best known story of Hensley’s beginning as a serpent handling preacher places him on White Oak Mountain near Ooltewah, Tennessee, at a place called Rainbow Rock. According to the tradition, Hensley went there to pray about the meaning of Mark 16. A rattlesnake appeared. He took it up without being bitten, then carried it down to the church, where others followed his example.
Historians handle this story with caution. Hensley himself helped spread it, and his followers repeated it. Burton noted that Hensley is generally recognized as the founder of modern Christian serpent handling, but he also warned that Hensley may or may not have been the first person to practice it. Other scholars have also pointed out that serpent handling may have appeared independently in more than one place.
Still, Hensley’s importance does not depend on proving that he was the very first. His importance rests on the fact that he carried the practice into public view. He preached it, dramatized it, defended it, and helped make it part of a small but persistent Appalachian religious tradition.
Cleveland, Tennessee and the Church of God
By 1914, Hensley had become connected to the Church of God in Cleveland, Tennessee, one of the major bodies of early southern Pentecostalism. That year is crucial. A Church of God Evangel notice reported that Brother George Hensley was conducting a revival at the tabernacle in Cleveland and that serpents had been handled during the meeting. Newspapers in Chattanooga and Cleveland quickly picked up the story.
The coverage made Hensley a regional name. Reporters treated the meetings as strange, dangerous, and theatrical. The believers saw something different. To them, the serpent was not a prop. It was a sign. It was proof that the Bible was still alive in the present world.
At first, the Church of God did not separate itself sharply from Hensley’s practice. The early Pentecostal movement was still defining what signs of the Spirit meant. If speaking in tongues and healing were present signs, Hensley asked why taking up serpents should be excluded. That question troubled Pentecostal leaders for years.
In 1915, Hensley was recommended for ministry in the Church of God and received an evangelist certificate. In 1917, he passed an official evangelist examination. In 1919, he renewed his certificate. These records are important because they show that Hensley was not merely an outsider shouting from the edge of the movement. For a time, he stood close enough to official Pentecostal institutions that his ministry had to be reckoned with.
Trouble at Home and Separation from the Church
Hensley’s public ministry was never separate from the disorder of his private life. Burton’s work shows a man who moved often, struggled in family life, and left behind a complicated trail of marriages, separations, and children. He married Amanda Wininger in 1901. Later records connect him with Irene Klunzinger, Inez Hutcheson, and Sally Norman or Moore.
By 1922 or 1923, Hensley had officially left the Church of God. The church record cited trouble at home. His withdrawal marked a turning point. The denomination increasingly moved away from serpent handling, especially as Pentecostal churches sought respectability and as public attention turned more hostile.
Hensley did not leave the practice behind. Even when institutional doors closed, he continued as an independent preacher. His ministry became more wandering, more irregular, and more tied to the small congregations and revival meetings that welcomed the signs.
Pineville, St. Charles, Norton, and the Coalfields
In the 1930s, Hensley returned to the mountains in force. He helped establish a free Pentecostal house of worship in East Pineville, Kentucky. From there, his ministry reached into the coalfield borderlands of Kentucky and southwest Virginia.
This part of the story matters for Appalachian history because it shows how serpent handling moved through the same corridors as coal work, mountain migration, and Holiness preaching. Hensley was reported in the St. Charles and Pennington Gap region of Virginia in the mid 1930s. Near Norton, Virginia, a large crowd gathered for one of his meetings. Newspaper accounts from southwest Virginia show that the practice had become a public controversy by then, drawing both believers and curious onlookers.
The coalfields were fertile ground for intense religious expression. Hard lives, dangerous work, illness, poverty, and isolation shaped the spiritual world of many mountain families. Serpent handling never represented most Appalachian churches, and it should never be treated as typical of Appalachian religion. Yet it did grow out of real Appalachian conditions, and Hensley became one of the figures who carried it from one mountain community to another.
Florida, Public Spectacle, and the Wider South
Hensley’s ministry did not stay in the mountains. By 1936, he had taken his family south in a house trailer and was preaching in Florida. In Tampa and nearby communities, his services drew crowds and newspaper attention. The farther he traveled, the more the press treated him as a curiosity.
That public fascination became part of the story. Newspaper writers often used harsh labels. They called serpent handling strange, fanatical, or worse. Magazine writers later turned the practice into a national symbol of mountain religion. Those portrayals helped spread Hensley’s name, but they also flattened the people involved. The believers were often shown as backward curiosities rather than as men and women acting within a religious world that made sense to them.
Hensley himself contributed to the spectacle. He was bold, dramatic, and willing to preach with danger in full view. Yet the meaning of the practice cannot be understood only by watching the snake. For believers, the serpent was part of a larger service filled with singing, prayer, preaching, testimony, healing, and the search for what they called the anointing.
Dolley Pond and the Law
In the 1940s, Hensley became associated with the Dolley Pond Church of God with Signs Following in the Grasshopper Valley area of Tennessee. The church became one of the best known serpent handling congregations in the region. It also became a legal battleground.
In 1945, Hensley and Tom Harden were arrested in Chattanooga for handling serpents during a faith healing service. The charges were eventually dismissed. Two years later, after Tennessee passed a law against displaying or handling poisonous snakes in a way that endangered life or health, authorities arrested Hensley, Harden, and others connected with Dolley Pond. The case drew heavy attention. J. B. Collins of the Chattanooga News Free Press photographed, interviewed, and documented the community, producing one of the most valuable near contemporary records of Hensley and his followers.
The court cases revealed the central conflict. Believers argued that serpent handling was obedience to God. The state argued that religious liberty did not include the right to endanger life. Courts generally sided with public safety. By the late 1940s, serpent handling had become not only a religious practice but a legal category.
The Last Service at Altha
George Went Hensley died in Florida, far from the disputed mountain birthplace that still follows his name. On July 24, 1955, he was preaching near Altha in Calhoun County, Florida, in an abandoned blacksmith shop. Several dozen people were present. A rattlesnake was brought into the service. Hensley handled it, and as he returned it to its container, it struck him on the wrist.
He refused medical treatment. He grew violently ill and died the next morning, July 25, 1955. Newspaper accounts spread quickly. Some reported that he had survived hundreds of previous bites. The Calhoun County sheriff recorded the death as suicide because Hensley had voluntarily handled the snake and refused medical aid.
It was a stark ending, but not a simple one. To outsiders, his death looked like the final proof against the practice. To believers, death by serpent bite did not necessarily disprove faith. Some saw such deaths as God’s will, mysterious but not meaningless. Hensley died inside the same belief that had made him famous.
What George Went Hensley Left Behind
George Went Hensley should not be remembered as a representative of all Appalachian religion. He was not that. Most Appalachian Christians rejected serpent handling, and many Pentecostals came to reject it too. But Hensley does belong in Appalachian history because his life shows how religion, poverty, migration, media, and law met in the mountain South.
His story also warns against easy categories. He was a preacher and a wanderer. A religious innovator and a troubled family man. A man of oral power who left behind a paper trail full of contradictions. A figure claimed by some as a founder and treated by others as an embarrassment. His name survives because he forced churches, newspapers, courts, and communities to answer a hard question: what happens when a believer reads a dangerous verse as a living command?
For Scott County, Virginia, the connection remains a research question worth pursuing. For Appalachia as a whole, George Went Hensley remains one of the most controversial religious figures the region ever produced. His path ran through the borderlands of Virginia and Tennessee, through Kentucky coal towns, through the courts of Chattanooga, and finally to a blacksmith shop in the Florida panhandle. Along that path, he helped turn a small mountain practice into a national symbol, misunderstood by many, defended by a few, and still studied more than seventy years after his death.
Sources & Further Reading
Burton, Thomas G. Serpent-Handling Believers. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. https://archive.org/details/serpenthandlingb00burt
McVicar, Michael J. “Take Away the Serpents from Us: The Sign of Serpent Handling and the Development of Southern Pentecostalism.” Journal of Southern Religion 15 (2013). https://jsr.fsu.edu/issues/vol15/mcvicar.html
Dixon Pentecostal Research Center. “About the Dixon Pentecostal Research Center.” Accessed June 18, 2026. https://www.dixonprc.org/aboutthedprc.html
Dixon Pentecostal Research Center. “Dixon Pentecostal Research Center.” Accessed June 18, 2026. https://www.dixonprc.org/
FamilySearch. “Rev George Went Hensley, 1881–1955.” Accessed June 18, 2026. https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/KZM3-KJ6/rev-george-went-hensley-1881-1955
Find a Grave. “Rev George Went Hensley.” Memorial ID 75801759. Accessed June 18, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/75801759/george_went-hensley
Christian History Institute. “They Shall Take Up Serpents.” Christian History Magazine. Accessed June 18, 2026. https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/they-shall-take-up-serpents
“Snake Handling.” Encyclopedia of Alabama. Auburn University. August 29, 2008. https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/snake-handling/
“Snake Handling.” NCpedia. Accessed June 18, 2026. https://www.ncpedia.org/snake-handling
Hood, Ralph W., Jr. “Snake-Handling Sects.” Hartford Institute for Religion Research. Accessed June 18, 2026. https://hirr.hartfordinternational.edu/articles/4604/
Middle Tennessee State University. “Snake Handling.” The First Amendment Encyclopedia. August 3, 2023. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/snake-handling/
Hood, Ralph W., Jr., and W. Paul Williamson. Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Christian Serpent-Handling Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/13067244
Kimbrough, David L. Taking Up Serpents: Snake Handlers of Eastern Kentucky. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002. https://www.mupress.org/Taking-Up-Serpents-Snake-Handlers-of-Eastern-Kentucky-P262.aspx
La Barre, Weston. They Shall Take Up Serpents: Psychology of the Southern Snake-Handling Cult. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962. https://archive.org/details/theyshalltakeups0000laba
Collins, J. B. Tennessee Snake Handlers. Chattanooga, TN: Chattanooga News-Free Press, 1947.
Church of God Evangel. “George Hensley Revival and Serpent Handling Reports.” Church of God Evangel, 1910–1915. Consult holdings through the Dixon Pentecostal Research Center, Cleveland, Tennessee. https://www.dixonprc.org/
Tomlinson, A. J. Diary and Church of God Records. Church of God archival collections, Dixon Pentecostal Research Center, Cleveland, Tennessee. https://www.dixonprc.org/
Archives of Appalachia. “Archives of Appalachia Newsletter, Vol. 8, No. 1.” East Tennessee State University, 1986. https://dc.etsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=archives-newsletter
Chattanooga News. “Holy Rollers Handle Snakes with Impunity.” September 10, 1914.
Chattanooga Daily Times. “Proselyting with Snakes.” September 16, 1914.
Cleveland Herald. “Snakes in Demand.” September 17, 1914.
Chattanooga Daily Times. “Reptile in the Meetin’.” September 21, 1914.
Chattanooga Daily News. “He Can Handle Snakes but Will He Walk the River?” September 24, 1914.
Chattanooga Times. “Holy Rollers Anoint One of Their Patients.” September 27, 1914.
Coalfield Progress. “Snake Head Torn Off to Climax Sunday Meeting at Ramsey.” August 22, 1935.
The Post. “No Law Against Handling Snakes.” Big Stone Gap, Virginia, October 8, 1936.
Tampa Morning Tribune. “Pastor Here Whirls Snake, It Escapes, People Flee.” March 2, 1936.
Abbott, Bill. “Man Bitten by Preacher’s Snake Dies.” Tampa Morning Tribune, May 5, 1936.
Newsweek. “They Shall Take Up Serpents.” August 21, 1944.
Time. “Americana.” March 10, 1947.
Chattanooga Times. “2 ‘Faith-Healing’ Ministers Held for Handling Snake in City Limits.” September 24, 1945.
Chattanooga Times. “Charges Dismissed Against Ministers.” October 16, 1945.
Pensacola News. “Rattlesnake Bite Kills 75-Year-Old Cult Head.” July 25, 1955.
New York Times. “Snake Kills Cultist.” July 26, 1955.
Chattanooga Times. “Snakebitten Preacher Dies; Listed as Suicide for Shunning Medicine.” July 26, 1955.
Author Note: This article treats George Went Hensley’s Scott County, Virginia connection carefully because later records conflict and a direct birth record has not yet been confirmed. It is written to separate documented Appalachian religious history from legend, sensationalism, and inherited claims.