Prepare to Meet God

Tazewell, Tennessee

"Prepare to Meet God" is a surviving relic of the late Henry Harrison Mayes (1898-1986), who spent decades driving around the U.S. erecting giant roadside crosses. Mayes, a guerrilla evangelist, cast his multi-ton monuments in cement (usually with the phrases "Prepare to Meet God" and "Jesus Is Coming Soon"), hauled them cross-country in a home-built trailer, and rarely asked permission from property owners. Some of his crosses are displayed at the Museum of Appalachia, and one is here, flat on the ground, in front of the large corrugated tin letters.

Mayes lived in a cross-shaped house about ten miles north of this ominous hillside display, whose fake graveyard strongly suggests that no one meets God and lives to tell about it.

The Tazewell Church of God, which owns the property, may have been attended by Mayes -- but he was carelessly nondenominational, visiting whatever church, synagogue, temple, or mosque happened to be nearby on his long road trips. He believed that his orders came direct from God, so all houses of worship were pretty much the same to him.

Mayes built several of these big "Prepare to Meet God" signs, which he placed just outside of airports (Most were quickly taken down). When he died he left a number of unplaced signs and monuments on his Cross House property, and when it was cleared out in 1996, this one was moved here.