The Archaeology of Utopian and Intentional Communities

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF UTOPIAN AND INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES

The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF FLORIDA

Florida A&M University, Tallahassee

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton

Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers

Florida International University, Miami

Florida State University, Tallahassee

New College of Florida, Sarasota

University of Central Florida, Orlando

University of Florida, Gainesville

University of North Florida, Jacksonville

University of South Florida, Tampa

University of West Florida, Pensacola

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF UTOPIAN AND INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES

STACY C. KOZAKAVICH

Foreword by Michael S. Nassaney

University Press of Florida

Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton

Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers · Sarasota

Copyright 2017 by Stacy C. Kozakavich

All rights reserved

Published in the United States of America

First cloth printing, 2017

First paperback printing, 2023

28 27 26 25 24 23 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kozakavich, Stacy C., author. | Nassaney, Michael S., author of foreword.

Title: The archaeology of utopian and intentional communities / Stacy C. Kozakavich ; foreword by Michael S. Nassaney.

Other titles: American experience in archaeological perspective.

Description: Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2017. | Series: The American experience in archaeological perspective | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017030471 | ISBN 9780813056593 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813068978 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Collective settlements—United States—History. | Utopias—United States—History. | Archaeology—Research—United States. | United States—History.

Classification: LCC HX653 .K69 2018 | DDC 307.770973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030471

The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida.

University Press of Florida

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http://upress.ufl.edu

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Encountering Community

1. Building the Ideal

2. Understanding Communities

3. Maps of Idealism: Intentional Community Landscapes

4. At Home, Work, and Worship: Community Built Environments

5. Material Visions: Artifacts in Community Contexts

6. Seeking Kaweah

7. Remaking Communities: Concluding Thoughts

Appendix: Archaeologically Studied Intentional Community Sites

References

Index

FIGURES

1.1. An Ephrata Cloister interpreter

1.2. Shaker Church Family Dwelling House, Canterbury, New Hampshire, built 1793

1.3. Excerpt from the plan of a section of the Harmonist village of Economy, Pennsylvania

1.4. Plates in a Middle Amana print shop

1.5. In the Hollow of His Hand: The Heavens in the Earth, from Cyrus Teed’s 1905 Cellular Cosmogony, or, The Earth a Hollow Globe

1.6. An advertisement for the Llano del Rio Company

2.1. Looking west across the trench that bisected the former location of the Doukhobor village of Kirilovka in Saskatchewan, Canada

2.2. Map of Doukhobor land reserves granted by the Canadian government in 1899

2.3. Aerial photo showing traces of Kirilovka in agricultural fields, 1944, and aerial photo with the 1907 lot and building layout and 1996 highway construction right-of-way superimposed

2.4. View along the side of a Doukhobor family’s house and yard in a Saskatchewan colony village

2.5. Scraps of linoleum and the molded glass base of a kerosene lamp

3.1. A View of the Comparative Situations of the Various Families at Union Village, Ohio

3.2. A schematic drawing of the North Lot of Union Village

3.3. Elevation and section of the Grotto in the Harmonists’ Great House Garden at Economy, Pennsylvania

3.4. The fireplaces and pillars of the Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony’s hotel

3.5. Architect Leonard A. Cooke’s plan for Llano del Rio

3.6. Alice Constance Austin’s radial plan for Llano del Rio

3.7. The town plan of Frederick G. Williams’s 1833 Revised Plat of the City of Zion

4.1. A view looking beneath the two identical staircases, Shaker East Family Dwelling House, Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

4.2. Brick arch remnant in the kitchen cellar, North Family Lot of Union Village, Ohio

4.3. The Middle Amana communal kitchen and cooper shop

4.4. Brook Farm with Rainbow

5.1. A partially melted copy of Babatunde Olatunji’s 1962 Flaming Drums! 136

5.2. Photo printed in the April 1917 issue of Llano del Rio’s publication, the Western Comrade 147

5.3. Examples of ceramic table, serving, and storage vessels

6.1. A 200-minute denomination time-check from the Kaweah Colony

6.2. Book cover illustration from an 1890 edition of Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward 168

6.3. Title illustration from Kaweah Commonwealth, 21 June 1890

6.4. Kaweah Colony camp locations along North Fork Drive

6.5. Looking southwest down the North Fork of the Kaweah River

6.6. Members and supporters of the Kaweah Colony

6.7. Photo of Advance, ca. 1888

6.8. The ca. 1888 view of the tent village of Advance from figure 6.7 superimposed on the modern landscape

6.9. A September 1889 view of Advance residents and tents

6.10. The Redstone family tent at Advance

6.11. A key found by archaeologists near 180N 170E at Advance

6.12. Overview map of archaeological survey and metal detector findings at Advance

7.1. A promotional poster for Historic Ephrata

7.2. A sign commemorating the Icarian presence at Nauvoo, Illinois

7.3. Reconstruction of the 1823 African Moravian Log Church, Old Salem, North Carolina

A.1. Locations of archaeologically studied intentional communities discussed in this book

FOREWORD

America was founded on dissent and has continued to attract social, religious, and political dissidents seeking fertile ground to sow new ideas about how to live in community. But even as America served as a beacon for the world’s tired, poor, and homeless imaginaries, once transplanted to the shores of this haven, the drudgery of daily life coupled with the inequities of new class relations re-created some of the conditions that propelled many to flee from their original homelands. Yet others—driven by a vision to abandon the shackles of greed, ignorance, avarice, and ennui—formed intentional communities and implanted themselves in places physically apart from mainstream society in an effort to realize their beliefs about proper social relations. Typically, they aimed to embrace new ways of being that would liberate them from the oppression and dehumanization that accompanied capitalism, patriarchy, and individualism as they aimed to transform the dominant culture.

Various groups at different historical moments worked to found a more perfect union while holding divergent values. Many were committed to hard work and spiritual purity, and grounded their beliefs in active choices regarding settlement location, building design, and consumer goods needed to sustain their own versions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A common practice of the dominant society is to point a discerning finger toward these social experiments, savor their supposed failure, and cast aspersions on those who would dare to attempt to live according to alternate values as a smoke shield to obscure the flaws of mainstream society.

I first became familiar with intentional communities in the early 1970s in conjunction with the counterculture movement. The idea of moving from a congested mill town in southeastern New England to the verdant hills of New Hampshire, Vermont, or upstate New York had a certain romantic appeal, though my middle-class values kept me closely tethered to family, school, and a part-time job in my father’s five-and-dime store. In my later teen years, I would on occasion escape my sheltered existence for a long weekend to a temporary utopia among swarms of rock music aficionados where I could temporarily turn on, tune in. I always returned to my reality, secretly envying those who had cut their bourgeois ties to build a new society. A more serious foray into communal living came when I discovered archaeology and lived on multiple occasions for several months with field crews who shared an ideology, or at least a work ethic, to retrieve the detritus of daily life from a wooded river valley in southwestern New Hampshire and later a plowed field on the Illinois prairie. Of course, I always considered this to be an extended apprenticeship and not a permanent condition in which my coworkers and I would cohabit indefinitely. Moreover, I can say in hindsight that much of this was merely adolescent angst and rebellion.

We would be foolhardy to confuse these trivial (but personally formative) experiences with the very serious and long tradition of utopian and intentional communities that social scientists—archaeologists among them—have studied in earnest since at least the 1980s. In The Archaeology of Utopian and Intentional Communities, Stacy Kozakavich joins this scholarly tradition, as she juxtaposes the goals of intentional communities and their material expressions. Archaeology is a particularly informative tool in this study because the avowedly ideological nature of intentional communities had a far-reaching influence on the ways in which they manipulated the material world. Communalists often grounded their beliefs in practice by constructing roads and landscapes; building houses and organizing space; and producing, selecting, and consuming goods that were consistent with their values and beliefs. And through its recursive power, architecture—as one form of material culture—expressed communal beliefs, while it simultaneously acted to codify and shape members’ behaviors in (sometimes) predictable ways.

Unlike some segments of society that intentionally hide their actions (for example, freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad), many intentional communities published their own newspapers and compiled regular reports, to produce a rich documentary record that can be tapped for data on self-perception (and sometimes self-deception). But Kozakavich reminds us of the necessity to balance deliberate self-reporting (often favorable, for obvious reasons) and the skeptical writings of journalists from the outside with the concrete but fragmentary evidence from material culture to more closely apprehend daily lived experiences of community members.

Kozakavich begins with a clear definition of what she means by intentional communities, which allows her to leave the occupants of prisons, dormitories, crew housing, and other temporary and involuntary associations for others to study. For her, intentional communities are composed of members united by a common vision of an ideal society and/or by a shared commitment among voluntary residents to provide an alternative to unacceptable conditions in the mainstream. In addition, their settlements are designed with permanence in mind and physically or geographically separated from those they aim to transcend. If social critique is inherent in intentional communities, we might expect colonies to form in the greatest numbers and varieties during historical periods characterized by economic crisis or divisive social conflict. Yet closer inspection reveals that there have always been intentional communities. Predictably, their forms, motivations, inspiration, and dominant values are varied. Early religious communities that archaeologists have studied include Ephrata, Shakers, Harmonists, Inspirationists, Zoar Separatists, Moravians, and Bishop Hill colonists, to name just a few. These early efforts set a precedent for subsequent intentional communities in the American cultural landscape. The nineteenth century saw various alternative developments, often in the face of the impersonal and alienated relations that obtained under industrial capitalism.

Many of the secular variants sought transformation from a disappointing present to a glorious future, aiming to reshape society in the image of an ideal. Their very existence stands as a critique of their culture of origin. Despite efforts to operate outside the surrounding society, they retain legal and economic ties that allow their continued operation. For Kozakavich, this speaks to the connectedness of intentional communities both across time and space. Members corresponded and learned from each other. They also retain the ideological tinges of wider society, such as gender divisions and racial biases. Material disparities between ideals and practices become apparent through archaeological investigation. The challenge is to go beyond these discrepancies to understand how members experienced life in past intentional communities, and how those experiences changed over time in response to broader changes at the community level and beyond.

Intentionality is apparent in the materiality of countless community members’ actions, from building foundations to bottle caps, animal bones to smoking pipes. Contextual relationships among varied objects can provide evidence of where and when community guidelines were practiced, and how individuals and families mobilized the material world—not always in compliance. Material evidence of practices that vary from those specifically required by community protocols can reveal the tension between the real and prescribed behaviors for individual members. Ceramics found in areas where Shaker women laundered clothing suggest that work took precedence over communal dining. The presence of a key at Kaweah may have been used to lock away private property, just as an 1884 nickel points to the persistence of a cash economy, despite the communal practices espoused by the membership.

Research designs can be oriented to examine various salient questions such as how a colony’s vision and environmental factors work together to structure a community’s material world, in terms of physical layout, architectural plans, and public and private spaces. We can ascertain competence in building abilities and the presence of adequate resources to execute building plans as envisioned. For example, the paucity of material remains and evidence of deliberate dismantling of buildings and the recycling of nails at Kaweah reveal a level of impoverishment, despite claims to the contrary. Locally produced goods and those brought from outside sources can be distinguished, along with their distribution among colonists. Food consumption from individually sized, single-portioned cans at California’s Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony (ca. 1914–1917) indicates an avoidance of communal meals and the ability to dine alone. Careful contextual analysis is necessary before we assume that objects were adopted with all the connotations of capitalism. Just as trade goods were reimagined by their Native American users, so too did communalists impose new meanings on the objects they used in daily life.

The challenge in interpreting the archaeology of utopian and intentional communities is in some ways no different than any interpretation of the past. How do we construct a narrative that is true to the communalists and presents their pasts as they were, rather than how we think they should be? How do we portray intentional communities in ways that do justice to their founders, adherents, and descendants? Perhaps this is particularly difficult because intentional communities have always been used as a foil for the dominant society. Efforts have been made repeatedly to discredit intentional communities and point to their failures. Yet, as Kozakavich notes, their historical contribution lies in the continuous recall of utopian possibilities. Archaeology is well positioned to keep those hopes and dreams alive as we uncover the detritus of everyday life and connect the past to the present by highlighting the influence that intentional communities had on forming the America we live in today. Social Security and other New Deal initiatives are safety nets inspired by intentional communities that close the gap between rich and poor, or at least keep greater numbers of citizens from falling below the poverty line. By contributing to a historical narrative that pays due diligence to our forebears, we participate in an emancipatory and activist archaeology that empowers those whose voices were silenced. We also gain a deeper appreciation for a more inclusive American experience and a better understanding of myriad contemporary forces that simultaneously aim to reveal and obscure our contested history and its archaeological expression.

Michael S. Nassaney

Series Editor

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Communities of the past have sparked my interest for more than twenty years, perhaps rooted in all the delicious slices of Doukhobor bread I ate at the Saskatoon Exhibition as a child, or in a visit during my teen years to a Hutterite Colony in Saskatchewan where we learned that the enigmatic women in polka-dot headscarves we’d occasionally see in city stores were part of something much larger. For encouraging my first archaeological look at the Doukhobors I owe a debt of gratitude to Margaret Kennedy and the faculty of the University of Saskatchewan Department of Anthropology and Archaeology. The staff at Western Heritage Services provided the crew, laboratory space, and specialized expertise for the 1996 study of Kirilovka, Saskatchewan. Thad Van Bueren bravely corralled a handful of us who worked at community sites to share our ideas in a themed session at the 2001 Society for Historical Archaeology conference in Long Beach, California, and then persevered for five years while we molded our papers into a themed volume for Historical Archaeology. Heather Van Wormer introduced me to the Communal Studies Association, an organization whose conferences redefine what community can mean in the professional and academic world.

The Kaweah Colony Archaeology Project, discussed in chapter 6, relied on help from many individuals and institutions. Thanks to Laurie Wilkie for advising and advocating for me in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. The Bancroft Library and Tulare County Historical Society provided funding and access to unparalleled archival sources. Thomas Burge, Ward Eldredge, and William Tweed of Sequoia National Park, and Duane Christian and Kimberly Cuevas of the Bureau of Land Management in Bakersfield shared local expertise and resources in helping to establish the project. Many residents of Three Rivers, including Sophie Britten, Jim Barton, Wilma Cauling, Marge Ewen, and Elena Broslovsky, shared knowledge and coffee. Sarah Barton Elliott and John Elliott keep the spirit of The Kaweah Commonwealth alive. Jay O’Connell offered his expertise and encouragement as a fellow scholar of Kaweah. Fieldwork depended on the generous access provided by Frank T. Elliott III and the Elliott Land and Cattle Company, and the hard work of volunteer crew members who braved mud, heat, and poison oak to collect data: Cheryl Smith-Lintner, Kim Christensen, Stacey Lynn Camp, Joann Grant, Rachel Giraudo, Tara Evans, Amanda Hallstrom, Katie Sprouse, John McWilliams, Chris Sheklian, Don Huff, Callen Huff, Phil Huff, Jonathan and Mona Maynard, Chris Avery, Miriam Lueck-Avery, Jan English-Lueck, Karl Lueck, Eilene Lueck, Kathleen Kubal, Chris Lloyd, Trish Wittenstein, Rita Pena, Josie Perez, and Dave Grant.

This volume was slow in the making, and I have deep appreciation for Thad Van Bueren’s recommendation, Sarah Tarlow’s early conversations with me about writing on this topic, and Michael Nassaney’s invitation to contribute to his series and his patience in waiting for the final product. Many fellow archaeologists and historians offered information about intentional community studies. James Kopp of Lewis & Clark College, Vincent Birdsong of the Florida Bureau of Historic Preservation, Linda Pansing of the Ohio History Connection, Edward Safiran at Bishop Hill State Historic Site, Mark Johnson at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, Floyd Mansberger of Fever River Research, and Scott Heberling of Heberling Associates, Inc. all shared research findings and access to reports. Michael Strezewski, Kim McBride, and Don Janzen gave their time for helpful conversations about their own research perspectives.

Several institutions granted permission for reproduction of images from their archival collections. Maps and photographs from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the National Air Photo Library of Canada; Library and Archives Canada; and the Saskatoon Public Library Local History Room illustrate and enhance this work immeasurably. The Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Historic American Building Survey, and Work Projects Administration Poster Collection, as well as the Internet Archive, provided invaluable digital research sources. Special thanks to Andy Sewell of Hardlines Design Company and Bruce Aument of the Ohio Department of Transportation for sharing images from their investigations at Union Village, Ohio; and to Breck Parkman for allowing use of images from Olompali State Historic Park.

Much gratitude to Eleanor Katari, whose editorial eye and word-charming skills helped smooth the draftiest drafts into something more coherent. Reviewers Lu Ann De Cunzo and Kim McBride offered invaluable suggestions for shaping the final version.

I am indebted most to my family, who have supported me throughout the writing process. My mother, Elaine Kozakavich, answered my calls on her Saskatoon local history expertise with enthusiasm. My father, Ron Kozakavich, distracted me just enough with good fish stories. My husband, Peter Merholz, has accompanied me on many travels to community sites around the country and has graciously endured my delves into places and people of the past. Jules and Dorothy remind me every day that no matter how hard it can be to work for a better shared world, it’s still worth trying.

INTRODUCTION

Encountering Community

Intentional communities have a long history in North America. We can follow a winding and colorfully stranded thread from today’s ecovillages, cohousing complexes, and collective farms through the countercultural communes of the 1960s and 1970s, to the socialist experiments on either side of the turn of the twentieth century and the vibrant rural religious communalists of the Second Great Awakening. How far back does this thread go, and where and when did it start?

Some would argue that group settlement based on shared ideals began in the early days of European settlement on the continent, with the arrival of Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock and the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Each could be construed as having much in common with later, more explicitly idealistic settlements, as these colonists shared strong religious beliefs at odds with the Church of England and fled here in search of the physical and metaphysical space to live according to their shared convictions. Yet the 41 passengers who originally signed the Mayflower Compact consisted of both Saints and Strangers—pilgrims who were searching for religious freedom as well as tradesmen and adventurers whose primary focus was a good return on their investment. The Civil Body Politic outlined in the Mayflower Compact established the Pilgrims’ government at Plymouth Plantation but in doing so explicitly recognized the ultimate sovereignty of King James. The religious communalists of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay have counterparts in the profit-focused entrepreneurs of Jamestown. The Virginia Company of London’s ca. 1607 Jamestown settlement, as well as the Puritan and Pilgrim colonists’ voyages and villages, operated their efforts as common stock operations in early years. In doing so they maintained written inclusion of English stockholders, and labored for the personal enrichment of a body of overseas investors whose contribution to the work of community building was based on the financial expectation of high returns (Hinds 1908:13–14). Evoking Puritan leader John Winthrop’s biblically inspired 1630 exaltation that the Massachusetts Bay Colony be as a city upon a hill glosses over the financially motivated aspects of these migrant groups’ origins and actions.

These dualities—cooperation and competition, communalism and capitalism, the collective and the individual—are intertwined in the roots of our historical understanding. In our current configuration of society, capitalism and individualism are seen as foundational ideologies. Their counterparts are considered weak, ancillary, subversive, or even un-American. Yet to think of this outcome as inevitable is to engage in a failure of historical imagination on a grand scale. The collective impulse has long been strong in North American history, and to discount its influence is to give short shrift to the many communities and associations that have worked hard to embody and live out their various versions of that ideal.

Donald Pitzer, a modern historian of communal settlements, recognizes that the Pilgrim separatists’ and Puritans’ short-lived communal economies, developed primarily to ensure their survival on North American shores, were nonetheless important in setting the stage for the following nearly four centuries of American communal societies (Pitzer 1997:6). These initial iconic colonies were just a few among many foundational examples of alternative economies and idealistic social designs that populated the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The ascetic residents of Bohemia Manor, a Protestant Labadist community in what is now Maryland, found refuge in the earliest days of American settlement, from 1683 to 1727. Members were monastic in their practices but severed ties to structured church institutions. English social reformer James Oglethorpe was inspired by the plight of his country’s worthy poor and jailed debtors in developing his vision for the Georgia Colony and its founding city of Savannah, established in 1733. Many nations among North America’s indigenous peoples demonstrated forms of collective social organization and resource sharing that were unfamiliar to European eyes, and yet were, in their contexts, the dominant societal pattern rather than alternative subcultures. North America was never settled as a single, unified community with shared goals. The contrasting threads of individuality and collectivism have created a space where individuals have the freedom to choose to pursue collective goals. Since the early days of European contact, this continent has offered fertile ground, both literal and figurative, where experimental communities could attempt to take root and grow.

The sixteenth-century voyages of discovery and early years of seventeenth-century colonization expanded the boundaries of the known world, and also provided new realms for the literary imagination. Idealistic authors brought the reading public’s awareness to the idea of new lands and distant indigenous populations, who were sometimes romanticized as being free from the maladies of European society. Storytellers traveled uncharted fictional distances for readers in a concrete world whose mapped expanses still contained enough unknowns for the imaginary to be discovered someday as real. With the maps being redrawn every day, finding heaven on earth may have seemed like only a matter of time. Sir Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia retells the fictional travels of its protagonist to an uncharted island whose inhabitants have built their society in ways that eliminated his perceived flaws of contemporary England: inequality, avarice, and war. James Harrington’s 1656 Commonwealth of Oceana demonstrated qualities of an ideal society that would later be fundamental to the thinking of Thomas Jefferson when drafting America’s Declaration of Independence (Kopp 2009:25). Writers later in the nineteenth century, when more of the globe had been charted by travelers over sea and rail, still found their perfect societies in faraway places just outside the realm of known geography. Etienne Cabet’s 1840 Voyage en Icarie, William Dean Howells’s 1894 A Traveler from Altruria, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 Herland, for example, all recount the experiences of travelers to, or visitors from, isolated countries. Edward Bellamy championed a different and more fanciful kind of travel than across oceans or mountains. His 1888 Looking Backward 2000–1887 took its protagonist, Julian West, across time into the future of Boston, Massachusetts, to demonstrate how close we could get to an ideal society in only five generations. Bellamy’s imagined future depended as much on liberating technological developments and advances in knowledge as it did on the will of the people to achieve a just society. Many of these fictional treatises were intended to inspire readers to incite change from within their own societies, with thinkers drawing inspiration and energy from eighteenth-century national-scale revolutionary social movements in North America and France. Some readers, however, may have taken as the moral the idea that a perfect society was achievable only in isolation. For others, the impetus to travel away from unbearable flaws may have been greater than the will to fight against established powers.

The combination of a vividly drawn example of a perfect society and opportunity of space for settlement may have felt like a clarion call to try to achieve the dream. Alternative communities are often held up by the mainstream merely as a foil to the values of American capitalism. This does a disservice to their own internal perception of themselves as radical change agents, working to remake this world or embody the next. Their stories, and the stories of all of North America’s intentional communities, are continuously and strongly interwoven into the fabric of our modern nations.

Our study of these idealistic groups, or intentional communities, sits at an intersection of two main bodies of historical thought: that of utopian and radical philosophies, and that of cooperative social structures and movements. Understanding these communities’ efforts contributes to our own deeper understanding of American history by holding