Anyone with any knowledge of the Koreshan would know the surname “Andrews”. The first of these was a man name A.W.K. (Abie) Andrews. He was, perhaps, the first follower of Cyrus Teed (Koresh). According the Claude Rahn’s “A Brief Outline of Dr. Cyrus R. Teed…”:
“…From Utica Dr. Teed moved to Binghamton N.Y. with his family about 1871, and there became acquainted with Dr. A.W.K. Andrews and his wife Mrs. Virginia H. Andrews.
Dr. Andrews was a man of distinguished appearance, standing well over six feet tall, and endowed with superior intellectual discerment and medical knowledge. He was born in Warren, Knox County, Maine May 12, 1833 and studied medicine at the University of Ann Arbor, Michigan. During the civial war he was attached to the Union Army as physician and surgeon at Alexandria Virginia. Here he met Miss Virginia Harmon whom he later married. He died in the Koreshan home in Chicago, Ill., February 18, 1891.
This friendship between Dr. Teed and Dr. Andrews proved to be lasting and valuable to the former in his subsequent effort to spread his doctrined and establish his communistic home. Dr. Andrews provided much needed financial assistance in those early years, and was helpful in aiding Dr. Teed to establish his hedical practive there and elsewhere as predjudice and persecution forced him to abandon on locality for another, once his strange theories became known in the communities where he had located.
In her book, “The Allure of Immortality“, Lyn Millner makes a number of references to A.W.K. Andrews, known as “Abie”. Most of these references are located in the State Archives in Tallahassee, however, at the Koreshan State Historic Site there is one document, albeit secondary that contains a number of transcripts of letters between members of the Andrews Family.
The document was donated to the Park in 2002 by a lady in Pennsylvania. She had been doing genealogy and found a relation to the Harmon family (Viginia Andrews maiden name). She did the transcription which is 22 typed pages. You can view them by going to the Archives. Click on the PDF links at the bottom.