CALIFORNIA COMMUNES IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
by
Timothy Miller, University of Kansas
Keynote address at “The Commune: Histories, Legacies, and Prospects in Northern California” conference, 233 Moses Hall, UC Berkeley, December 11, 2004
Two-pronged approach to the topic:
1) History of California communes; emphasis on N California
2) History of the 1960s-era communes
Some would argue that a historical account of communes in California should begin with American Indian communities, or perhaps the Spanish missions. Both of those situations had elements of intentional community about them, but neither really fits the kinds of definitions most of us would use for modern intentional communities, which among other things deliberately separate themselves from the dominant society. So today I will survey some communes founded in California mainly by non-Hispanic, non-Indian people since the mid-19th century. Probably the earliest commune thus defined was that of the Mormons who settled in San Bernardino in 1852, a hundred families strong. They had a strong communal existence for two years or so, after which the cooperative features of the settlement declined until 1857, when Brigham Young called them back to the Salt Lake Valley.
The first relatively long-lived community was founded in 1875. Fountain Grove was the final community of the Brotherhood of the New Life, founded by the Spiritualist and sometime Swedenborgian mystic Thomas Lake Harris. The Brotherhood prospered with a dairy farm and then extensive vineyards, boosted by the fortune of Laurence Oliphant, who gave up a seat in Parliament to join Harris’s movement. Sensational and shamefully inaccurate stories in the press about sexual misconduct and abusive treatment of followers in the early 1890s led Harris to leave his comfortable community, although some members stayed there, and continued to operate the winery, as late as 1934. The buildings were eventually demolished, save one: the round barn in the northern suburbs of Santa Rosa that you can glimpse off to the east of highway 101.
1881 saw the birth of Icaria Speranza near Cloverdale. The Icarian movement derived from the French novel Voyage en Icarie, by Etienne Cabet, and was one of at least two communes in California that set out to implement fictional utopian scenarios. Cabet stirred up such a following that his followers purchased a large expanse of land in Texas and started to move there in 1848. For several reasons the location was disastrous, but the group was soon able to purchase Nauvoo, Illinois, recently abandoned by the Mormons. Eventually internal dissension caused the movement to split, and after various shifts one of the Icarian bodies purchased a fine tract on the Russian River. For five years they lived out the communal Icarian dream, making wine that they sold in their cooperative store in Cloverdale. The community lasted until 1886, when it went bankrupt.
One of the most ambitious projects of all was the Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth, founded in 1885 near Visalia. Kaweah was the brainchild of Burnette G. Haskell and James J. Martin, socialist labor leaders in San Francisco who were inspired by a wave of communal fervor that swept through socialist circles in the latter years of the nineteenth century. They acquired land in a creative way: all at once 45 colonists filed claims on adjoining tracts of homestead land. By 1886 the colony was in full swing, and over the next few years several businesses were started. By 1890 the colonists had completed the prodigious task of opening a road to their domain through the mountainous terrain of the Kaweah River valley. However, in that year the colony was destroyed by the federal government, which preempted colony land for Sequoia National Park. The government refused to compensate the colonists, claiming that their land claims were invalid. Hostile press coverage fanned public opinion against the victims of the federal action. Kaweah was finished in a manner most unethical. A final repudiation of the audacious socialists came when the largest tree in the world, which the colonists had named the Karl Marx tree, was renamed the General Sherman tree.
In 1893 Erastus Kelsey of Oakland and Kate Lockwood Nevins, a populist organizer, opened a commune on Winters Island, located in Suisun Bay near the confluence of the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers. At least 100 persons joined the Winters Island organization, and of them perhaps two dozen took up residence there. The colony, alas, never got well established economically, because the founders had unfortunately established the colony just as the panic of 1893 swept the country. The resulting depression devastated the prices the colonists got for their onions and other crops, and things fell apart in the second half of the decade.
The following year, 1894, saw the creation of Altruria, like Icaria Speranza based on a utopian novel, in this case William Dean Howells’s book A Traveller from Alturia. The popular tale captivated the imagination of Edward Biron Payne, a young Unitarian minister, and with half a dozen or so families and a few singles he founded Altruria on Mark West Creek north of Santa Rosa. The pioneers built several houses and, most ambitiously, started work on a hotel and community center. New members joined, and things seemed to go well. But the hotel was never finished, and within a few months the community was insolvent. Altruria was effectively finished in the summer of 1895.
The last California communal experiment of the century was established at Point Loma, near San Diego, in 1897. Following the death of founder Helena Blavatsky in 1981 the Theosophical Society fragmented, and Katherine Tingley emerged as the leader of one of the factions. At Point Loma she built what I would say was the most substantial community, in terms of its built environment, in California history. Supported by wealthy patrons including the sporting-goods magnate Albert Spalding, the community featured dramatic, mystical architecture, and Tingley’s love of the theater led to elaborate productions of Shakespearian dramas. After Tingley’s death in 1929, however, the community declined. The property was sold in 1942 and is now occupied by the Point Loma Nazarene College, which teaches its conservative Christian point of view in buildings erected for the pursuit of a radically different religion. Other Theosophical communities were to follow later, including the Temple of the People near Pismo Beach, Krotona, in Hollywood and later Ojai, and the Summit Lighthouse, later known as the Church Universal and Triumphant, which had a large communal operation at Malibu before it moved to Montana.
In the early twentieth century the communal rage was cooperative colonies of small back-to-the-land farms. The first and probably best-known of them was the Little landers project, the first of whose colonies was opened at San Ysidro under the enthusiastic leadership of William E. Smythe in 1909. Smythe believed that a family could eke out a living from the intensive cultivation of one acre, and by1912 the colony had 116 families farming their acre plots and enjoying an active communal social and cultural life centered on the community clubhouse. By 1916 several other Little Landers colonies had opened elsewhere in California, in Palo Alto, Alameda County, Cupertino, San Fernando, and Tujunga. Some settlers were unable to make farming on an acre pay, and eventually they left, but the devastation of the original colony by a flood in 1916 was the biggest factor in the decline of the movement. A Little Landers museum operates today in the former community center in Tujunga, however. In 1912 a similar project called Los Angeles Fellowship Farms was established by Kate D. Buck, a dentist, and 50 or 60 persons settled on small plots near La Puente, but most found that they could not make a living on an acre, and the project slowly disintegrated.
Llano del Rio, founded in the Antelope Valley northeast of Los Angeles in 1914, was one of the most notable communal experiments in California history. Job Harriman, a prominent socialist attorney who became disillusioned with the prospects for socialism after losing a race for mayor of Los Angeles, turned his attention to creating a communal socialist settlement that was the biggest commune in California history. By the summer of 1917 it had reached the astonishing population of 1100, and its atmosphere was sizzling. But it lacked the water rights it would need for enduring success, and to survive it moved to an abandoned lumber-company town in Louisiana in 1918, where as Newllano it survived until 1938.
At one point the California state government sponsored two intentional communities. With appropriations of well over a million dollars, Durham and Delhi were opened in the late 1910s near Chico and Merced, respectively. Durham, particularly, had solid initial success, but both colonies fell victim to the rural depression of the early 1920s.
Holy City was one of the most eccentric of the California communes. William Riker had been promoting his “Perfect Christian Divine Way,” the most notable feature of which was his extremist white racism, for several years when he purchased land for a commune in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1918. Around 30 followers joined Riker at the site, which was located roughly halfway between Santa Cruz and San Jose. They built a tourist-stop business there, with gas, food, ice cream, and all kinds of attractions ranging from a soda-pop factory to a zoo. The colony finally withered, not least because of Riker’s arrest for sedition when he openly admitted his admiration for Adolf Hitler during World War II.
One more community that deserves mention is the Colony, located an hour or so inland from Arcata. A group of Christian believers left Seattle and settled at their new location in 1940, quietly building a community that gradually became well accepted by its neighbors. Eventually the members began to die off, but when the population was down to a mere four in the 1970s a new generation of spiritual seekers began to arrive, and eventually the Colony was thriving again. It survives today with around a dozen members who reject human-created doctrines and ceremonies in favor of a lived faith, operating an organic farm and a plumbing business. At age 64, the Colony is one of the longest-lived and most stable communes in California history.
There were several other pre-1960 communes that my time keeps me from describing in any detail: the so-called “Polish Brook Farm” of Helena Modjeska at Anaheim; the raw-food vegan colony called Joyful near Bakersfield; the socialist colony called the Army of Industry at Auburn; Pisgah Grande, a substantial religious colony near Simi Valley; the Thelemic Magic community of Pasadena, founded by devotees of the British occultist Aleister Crowley; Trabuco College, a Vedanta commune at which Aldous Huxley lived for a time; Tuolumne Cooperative Farms, a Quaker-inspired colony near Modesto; and the Ma-Na-Har Cooperative Community at Oakhurst, also founded by Quakers. The list is an extensive one.
But I do want to get on to the communes of the 1960s era, which to me means the period from about 1965 to 1975. Those communes had important roots in the earlier communes in California and elsewhere, a topic to which I shall return presently. They are also inseparable from the enormous wave of social change that swept the globe during that time. They were products of their age, and they helped shape their age.
There is no exact beginning to the new communalism of the 1960s era; rather, the communes were simply part of the larger emerging Zeitgeist. In the 1950s hints of the cultural future began to emerge with, for example, the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in 1956 following an obscenity trial, and the appearance of such shocking new magazines as The Realist, published by Paul Krassner, and Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, published by Ed Sanders. In 1959 Ken Kesey volunteered to be a subject in controlled experiments with psychoactive drugs, and soon an alternative community found its way to his home on Perry Lane in Palo Alto, where the daring new substances were freely available and ingested. Forced out of Perry Lane by a fancy real-estate developer, Kesey moved to a small house in La Honda, and an intentional, or perhaps unintentional, community began to emerge there. The Merry Pranksters, whose formative role in the emerging counterculture was anchored by the famous psychedelic cross-country bus trip in 1964, let us know that something new was happening, Mr. Jones.
Other parts of the communal scene had already began to appear by the time Kesey and the Pranksters had become nationally known. Gorda Mountain, on the Big Sur coast, pointed the way to the open-land communes that would proliferate a few years later. In 1962 Amelia Newell, who owned an art gallery in the tiny town of Gorda, opened her land to anyone who wanted to stay here, and it became a popular bohemian stopping-off place between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Its population grew slowly, reaching a peak of perhaps 200 during the summer of 1967. But Gorda’s neighbors never got over their outrage at what was happening, and managed to get the scene closed down in 1968.
Another piece of the mosaic emerged at about the time Gorda Mountain did. Bob Hanson, who had grown up in the Lake Tahoe area and traveled to Ceylon to study yoga in the 1940s and had been initiated into Hinduism there, returned in the late 1950s to establish his own religious organization. By now known as Master Subramuniya, in 1962 he bought an old brewery building in Virginia City, Nevada, and established an intentional community for his religious movement, known as the Himalayan Academy. The movement later moved its headquarters to the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where it remains today, but the exotic religious communards of Virginia City definitely helped shape the emerging new culture.
Meanwhile things were also happening outside California. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert left Harvard University in 1962 amid enormous controversy over their research on LSD, and soon established the communal International Foundation for Internal Freedom in two houses in Newton, Massachusetts. The scene there in some ways resembled that of the Pranksters at La Honda, with strange music, weirdly dressed people, and psychedelically-fueled behavior. At that point their devotees Peggy, Tommy, and Billy Hitchcock, heirs to a huge fortune, offered Leary and company the use of their family estate at Millbrook, New York, a property of several thousand acres and many buildings, including a 64-room mansion. There a core group of 25 to 30 people, plus many visitors, lived communally until about 1967, when outside pressure on the Hitchcocks had become unbearable and the place was shut down. A new communal experience, indeed.
About the time Leary and company moved to Millbrook, another new commune was established on the west coast, this time in Washington. Huw “Piper” Williams, who had been involved in the peace movement, became determined to start what he called “a simple living kind of alternative Christian lifestyle” featuring cooperation and self-reliance. In the spring of 1963 he invited some peacenik friends to join him at a new commune outside Spokane. Thus did Tolstoy Farm take shape. It had only one rule: no one could be asked to leave. Life wasn’t easy at Tolstoy, whose open door attracted a goodly contingent of misfits, one of whom apparently burned down the main house. But somehow it worked. Tolstoy Farm is alive and reasonably well today, 41 years after its founding. Piper Williams lives on another commune nearby called Earth Cycle Farm.
Other experiments pointing the way toward the communes that spread like wildfire after 1966 took place over the next couple of years. Most importantly, probably, Drop City was founded in southern Colorado in 1965, a colony of bohemian artists who saw themselves as creating a whole new civilization, rejecting paid employment and making their art inseparable from their lives. In housing themselves they created some of the most memorable communal architecture ever, geodesic-style domes colorfully covered with car tops retrieved from junkyards. Drop City was a major inspiration for the communes founded over the next few years.
Back in California another commune began to take shape as Drop City was getting under way. In 1965 Hugh Romney and friends were offered the free use of a farmhouse and thirty acres overlooking the San Fernando Valley if they would tend the owner’s swine. From that beginning emerged the Hog Farm, which burst into national prominence as the “Please Force” at Woodstock. The Hog Farm is still very much alive and well today, with a main enclave in Berkeley and a second location, Black Oak Ranch near Laytonville, where Hugh Romney, now known as Wavy Gravy, runs his clown camp.
Not much later the Diggers began contributing to the cultural scene in a way that would influence and promote communes. Living on society’s leftovers and espousing a belief that everything should be free, the Diggers took all kinds of people into their several communal households. Others emulated the Digger example, and for a time informal urban communes and crashpads proliferated. Some of the scenes were chaotic, but others functioned well and introduced thousands to a new way of living.
As the Haight-Ashbury began to develop into the country’s premier countercultural enclave, another landmark commune of the new era began to take form 50 miles to the north. Lou Gottlieb, the bassist and resident guru/humorist for the popular folk-singing group the Limeliters,
purchased a thirty-two acre farm in Sonoma County near Occidental. His friend Ramón Sender moved to the property in the spring of 1966, and others soon followed. No one was turned away, and the population grew steadily for a year. Then the summer of love arrived, 1967, and soon hundreds were living at Morning Star Ranch. Gottlieb became passionately dedicated to the precept of open land, turning no one away, and at one point deeded Morning Star to God. The gospel of open land did not sit well with the Sonoma County authorities, however, and conflicts soon flared. Before it was all over, county bulldozers leveled the hand-built structures of Morning Star four times. But those dedicated souls did not give up; some moved to Wheeler’s Ranch nearby, which Bill Wheeler opened to all comers when the situation at Morning Star became desperate. Others moved to New Mexico and started a new Morning Star there near the great communal mecca of Taos, which had blossomed after the founding of New Buffalo in 1967. Even today, when Morning Star survives mainly as an email list and an annual reunion, many of those who were there regard their Morning Star days as a peak life experience.
Meanwhile all kinds of other communes were starting up. In 1967 Don McCoy rented the large house at Olompali Ranch, near Novato, and invited a circle of his close friends to move in. McCoy’s ample checkbook paid all the bills, and for a year or so a most mellow scene flourished, although a series of disasters led to Olompali’s closing in 1969. But by then communes were being founded at a torrid rate. In 1968 some Haight-Ashbury refugees started Table Mountain Ranch near Albion, in Mendocino County, and it continues today. Black Bear Ranch was founded about the same time in an extremely remote location in northwest California, ten miles from any neighbor, a site chosen as a base for the revolution many thought was coming, and it also continues today. The list is quite a long one, and if I had unlimited time I could go on at some length.
I do want to emphasize that the story very much continues today. The 2000 edition of the Communities Directory, the most comprehensive source available, lists 73 active communities in California, and the related ic.org website, which is updated regularly, had 120 California listings when I looked at it last week. One could debate the status of some of those communities, which are small or in some cases are really just concepts that have not yet been actualized, but scores of intentional communities are active in California today, as they are in the rest of the nation and indeed the world. Ananda Village, founded in 1968 near Nevada City as a spiritual community by Donald Walters, or Swami Kriyananda, has a population in the hundreds. Harbin Hot Springs, a communally-organized spa and resort near Middletown, has over a hundred resident members. The Magic community in Palo Alto, which is active in environmental work, currently lists 31 members. All kinds of religious communities operate throughout the state, related to the Zen Centers of San Francisco and Los Angeles, various Christian churches, and several other religions ranging from the Church of Scientology to the Emissaries of Divine Light.
In the secular realm, two types of community represent the cutting edge today. One is the ecovillage movement, which seeks to create small, sustainable enclaves where people may truly live lightly on the earth, getting away from the prodigious consumption of resources that characterizes mainstream American life. Most of the ecovillage projects are rural, but an interesting variation is located right in the center of Los Angeles, where the principles of sustainable living are being woven into an intensely urban fabric. It will be most interesting to see how the Los Angeles Ecovillage plays out.
The other type of community that is probably the fastest-growing of them all today is cohousing. Like the ecovillage movement, cohousing seeks to use resources efficiently while creating a real sense of community that counters the alienation of so much of American life. In cohousing people have private homes but share many facilities and typically eat several meals a week together. There are quite a few cohousing projects today in California; the website of the Cohousing Association of the United States lists 31, some completed, some still in planning or construction stages, and I know of two others. One of the more innovative ones is Doyle Street Cohousing, located just a short distance from here in Emeryville. Built in a former warehouse, the 12 units at Doyle Street recently reported a population of 21 adults and 7 children, and there was a waiting list to get in.
Returning to the communes of the 1960s era, I have one last matter to address: just why did all of these communes get founded then? Where did this enormous surge of communal energy come from? When I began taking a serious look at the history of the 1960s communes, the standard wisdom was they had either come out of nowhere, like Athena from the head of Zeus, and thus were simply historically unprecedented, or that they had developed in reaction to the degeneration of the counterculture–that is, as the Haight-Ashbury and other similar enclaves in fairly short order devolved from centers of peace and love to crime-ridden hangouts for needle-drug users, the idealistic remnant fled the city to pursue new and communal ways of living somewhere out on the land.
As it happens, both of those explanations are quite wide of the mark. The communes of the 1960s era were not unconnected to history, but had clear ties to communities that went before. The fact that many of them were founded well before the decline of the Haight and the East Village contradicts the second hypothesis.
No knowledge of history? If that was the case, why did the Diggers consciously name themselves after a countercultural movement of an earlier era? Why did Twin Oaks community in Virginia name its buildings after earlier communes–Llano, Harmony, Degania, Kaweah? Peruse the issues of the Modern Utopian, the magazine of the hip communes, and you will see abundant writings on communes of earlier times–of the Oneida Community, the large group-marriage commune in New York State in the nineteenth century, and the Hutterites, the Anabaptist communal farmers of the northern plains, to name but two examples. A Digger I interviewed several years ago told me that in his communal household in San Francisco, members read and discussed such works of American communal history as the History of American Socialisms, a survey of nineteenth-century communes written by the communal leader John Humphrey Noyes.
Did Drop City come out of nowhere? Hardly. Two of the founders had grown up in New York City as red-diaper babies, and the language of cooperation was in their red blood. The third founder was of Kansas Mennonite background, and again the theme of cooperative interaction had been in his environment from birth. Lou Gottlieb, the impressario of Morning Star Ranch, had earlier been a Communist, as had Richard Marley, the cofounder of Black Bear Ranch who grew up as another red-diaper baby. Piper Williams of Tolstoy Farm got some of his main ideas from his stay at the communal farm of the Committee for Nonviolent Action in Connecticut, a center of both pacifist activism and communal sharing, and from the Catholic Worker movement, which had been operating both urban and rural communes since the 1930s. Stories of socialist, or cooperative, or communal, or at least politically progressive, backgrounds are legion among the people who populated the 1960s communes.
The case of Ramón Sender, the first resident at Morning Star, is instructive. His father was an anarchist and sometime Communist in his native Spain. At age 16 the younger Sender met a great-granddaughter of John Humprey Noyes, the founder and leader of the Oneida Community in the late nineteenth century. Together they visited the Oneida Mansion House, the 300-room community home where her grandparents were still living. In 1957 they visited and then joined the Bruderhof, a Hutterite-like community that has endured for nearly a century, most recently in the eastern United States. For Ramón Sender, community did not come out of nowhere.
Moreover, many communes of earlier vintage were still on the scene when the 1960s rolled around. Koinonia Farm in Georgia, for example, was founded in 1942 as an outpost of Christian living especially dedicated to racial equality and eventually became the birthplace of Habitat for Humanity. Various religious communities and radical political colonies and land-trust enclaves were scattered across the country. There were even still a few Shakers left in Maine. When a new generation became interested in communal living, there were usually existing communities to visit. And visit they did, sometimes overwhelming the rather sedate older communities.
Thus it is not surprising to learn that many of the ideals and practices of the 1960s communes had solid historical precedents. Was vegetarianism something new, for example? Well, the Fruitlands Community of A. Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane, founded in 1843, avoided not only animal products in food and clothing, but the use of animals for farm work, and for good measure it forbade cotton clothing, because that was a product of slavery. Was Lou Gottlieb doing something unprecedented when he deeded Morning Star Ranch to God? Not exactly; in the 1860s Peter Armstrong, leader of the Celestia commune in Pennsylvania, did exactly the same thing. A yearning to go back to the land, a yearning for personal fulfillment, a yearning for simple living, a yearning for warm interpersonal relationships–those are the building blocks of intentional communities in all ages. And similarly historic are some of the problems of the communal enterprise. The 1960s communes, especially the ones with open membership, had terrible problems with deadbeats, loafers, and crazies. But it has always been that way. The Shakers had a long tradition of taking in “Winter Shakers,” people who would come in the fall professing interest in joining and living comfortably in a colony through the winter, only to leave again when it warmed up.
As we historians like to observe, nothing comes from nowhere. Our past helps inform and define out future. California has a rich communal heritage, and I am happy to be here to celebrate it today.
by
Timothy Miller, University of Kansas
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