Home of the Double Headed Eagle

In 2004, Ali Colleen Neff and photographer Tim Gordon made a wrong turn off Highway 61 near Vicksburg. They soon encountered The Home of the Double-Headed Eagle, a kaleidoscopic work of visionary architecture created by the Reverend H. D. Dennis and his wife, Margaret Dennis. The couple, now in their nineties, has been inviting visitors to explore their creation and to hear the non-denominational gospel since 1980, when Reverend began to build the work from the frame of Margaret’s little country store. On a number of subsequent visits, Neff, a student in the UNC Folklore M. A. Curriculum, gathered the couples’ life stories, which do much to explain the transcendence and global symbolism imbued in the Dennis’ work. She returned in 2006 with documentarian Brian Graves of the UNC Communications Studies Ph.D. program to create this short doc. This piece, filmed on a single day, focuses on the context surrounding the visionary architecture of the Reverend H. D. and Margaret Dennis.