By Rick Steelhammer, Charleston Gazette-Mail
FLATWOODS, W.Va. — Forty years ago this week, Bernard Coffindaffer and a small group of helpers erected a cluster of three crosses atop a grassy knoll overlooking Interstate 79 near the geographic center of West Virginia near the Braxton County community of Flatwoods.
At the center of the cluster — representing the three crosses involved in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and two thieves at Calvary — stood a 25-foot-tall painted cross, flanked by a pair of 20-foot light blue crosses.
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.
