Test of Faith: Signs, Serpents, Salvation by Lauren Pond

In 1983, when he was fifteen years old, “Mack” Wolford’s father, a serpent-handling pastor from Phelps, Kentucky, died of snakebite at a West Virginia church service. Wolford worked a variety of jobs, including at a North Carolina textile mill, as a window installer in Texas, and a drywall installer in Tennessee. In 1995 he married his wife, Fran. While maintaining machinery at a West Virginia coal mine, he was injured and went on disability. In 1999 he became an ordained preacher and began following his father’s snake-handling faith. In May of 2012, twenty-nine years after the death of his father, Wolford was bitten by “Old Yeller,” a snake he owned and had handled often, at a service at the Panther Wildlife Area in McDowell County, West Virginia. Wolford was buried next to his father in Phelps, Kentucky. Lauren Pond, a documentary photographer originally from California, was invited by Wolford to photograph his services in 2011, and was invited into Wolford’s home as he was dying. Sh