James J. Kopp

Research Files

Documenting Utopia in Oregon

The Challenges of Tracking the Quest for Perfection

The task of documenting utopia in Oregon is in itself a utopian ordeal. Using the dichotomous nature of the word given by Thomas More in Utopia, published in 1516, it is both a "good place" and a "no place."¹ Documenting Oregon's historic utopias shares the good place/no place dichotomy because, although Oregon's utopian heritage is rich, the challenges of documenting it are significant. It is a "good place" in that historians, archivists, and interested individuals wish to have records available to understand the important role that the quest for perfection has played in Oregon's history. It is a "no place" because, much like More's fictitious island, the documentation — and in many cases the topics of the documentation — do not seem to exist.²

Oregon's utopian heritage is rooted in the dreams of landscapes and opportunities that attracted pioneers and settlers to this land, individuals labeled "eden seekers" by Malcolm Clark, Jr.³ The physical space and its beauty conjured visions of Eden, but as William L. Lang notes, "The image of Oregon carried more than just a symbolic physical resemblance to Eden; it also suggested a community that had a regenerative quality, one that could restore damaged lives."⁴ This regenerative quality served and — as Lang points out, still serves — as the basis for Oregon's reputation as an "Eden of expectations." While this view is generally manifested in the state's broad social, cultural, and political history, it is also clear in the many specific attempts to seek perfection in Oregon. These efforts range from nineteenth-century communal colonies such as Aurora and New Odessa to the post-1965 outburst of communes and other "intentional communities." Oregon's utopian heritage is also reflected in utopian literature produced by Oregon writers such as Jeff W. Hayes and Ursula K. Le Guin.⁵ My own utopian quest is to locate, review, and record resources concerning utopian experiences in Oregon in order to produce a guide to documents about Oregon's often overlooked utopian heritage.⁶

The community band mingles behind the Pioneer Hotel in Aurora, in the lower Willamette Valley just north of Woodburn. Both the Aurora band and the hotel became symbols of the success of the Aurora Colony.

OHS neg., OrHi 54865

Although based in a long-standing interest in Oregon's utopian past, my immediate impetus for this project was the acquisition, in November 2002, of three documents associated with the dissolution of the Aurora Colony in Oregon and the Bethel Colony in Missouri. These two utopian settlements were founded by William [Wilhelm] Keil, who died on December 31, 1877, without an heir apparent to lead the two colonies. After his death, the trustees of both enterprises sought an orderly and legal dissolution of the properties, and the three documents I obtained are all related to this action. One is an eight-page manuscript letter related to the appraisement of the Keil estate, dated September 28, 1878, from the trustees of Aurora to Jacob Miller and other trustees of Bethel. The second is a six-page manuscript letter from W.H. Effinger, a Portland attorney who represented the Aurora trustees, to Jacob Miller, dated September 30, 1878, dealing with the same issue. The third item is a detailed appraisement of Keil's entire estate. Included with the Miller letter is an envelope addressed to him in Bethel with an annotation on the back reading, "Letters of Effinger & of the Aurora Community concerning our appraisement. Take this along to Ogn." These documents provide an intriguing and important glimpse into the final years of the Aurora Colony as a utopian settlement.

Beyond their historical significance, the recent availability of these documents raises questions about their provenance and about where other documentation related to the Aurora Colony may exist. In his pseudo-historical narrative Bethel and Aurora (1933), Robert Hendricks notes: "There was a long series of letters between the trustees at Aurora and those at Bethel. A chest full of this correspondence still exists."⁷ The documents in hand certainly are likely to be part of those Hendricks mentions, but the questions remain about where that "chest full" of documents was in the early 1930s and about what has happened to them since. Seeking a solution to that mystery was further cause for undertaking a broader project that I have labeled "Eden within Eden: Documenting Oregon's Utopian Heritage."

The Aurora Colony provides one case study in documenting utopia, but in many respects it is atypical of the utopian experiments that took place in Oregon. The colony lasted over twenty years and was a continuation of Keil's communal experiment undertaken at Bethel.⁸ Because it was a successful community in many respects — with its musical heritage and several business enterprises, including the Aurora Hotel — there are substantial records associated with the Aurora experience. Many of these records are part of a collection in the Aurora Colony Historical Society, housed in the Old Aurora Colony Museum in Aurora.⁹ Earlier major efforts in tracking the documentation of the Aurora Colony were undertaken by Clark Moor Will (1893–1982), a descendant of colony settlers, and Patrick J. Harris, director of the Aurora Colony Historical Society from 1983 to 1996. Besides working to gather information on the history of the colony, Will wrote many pamphlets, presented numerous talks, and drew several sketches and illustrations depicting the past and present of Aurora.¹⁰ Many of the documents that Will obtained, as well as his own research and writing, are included in the collections of the Aurora Colony Historical Society and the Clark Moor Will Papers at the University of Oregon Libraries. Other records from the colony can be found at the Oregon Historical Society, the Oregon State Archives, and local historical societies and academic institutions and within many personal collections, in particular those of families of colony members and their descendants. Because of the relationship with the Bethel community, documents associated with the Aurora settlement can also be found in repositories and collections in Missouri and elsewhere.

This ad for the Nehalem Valley Co-Coperative Colony appeared in the Los Angeles Weekly Nationalist on May 17, 1890.

Despite the relatively abundant documentation, there are still several problems in tracking the history of the Aurora Colony. These issues will be touched on below, but they pale in comparison to the challenges of documenting other utopian communities and endeavors. Compared to Aurora, other nineteenth-century utopian communities in Oregon (and elsewhere) were often short-lived and transitional in nature, and they left little, if any, record of their existence. Standard compilations about utopian communities in nineteenth-century America list just three colonies in Oregon in addition to Aurora: New Odessa, a Jewish agrarian colony in Douglas County that existed from 1882 to 1887 (dates vary for this colony and for others); the Nehalem Valley Cooperative Colony (initially known as the Columbia Cooperative Colony), which was established in 1886 at Mist in Columbia County and lasted until 1892; and the Union Mill Company at Nehalem in Tillamook County, which existed from 1892 to 1896.¹¹ Of these, New Odessa is the most substantially documented, primarily because of its ties with a broader Jewish agrarian movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹² I have identified little documentation for the Nehalem Valley Cooperative Colony and the Union Mill Company.¹³

At least three other nineteenth-century Oregon utopian experiments have been documented. Two were located in what is now Lincoln County and lasted no more than two years. The earlier of these was established in 1886 and was located on Poole Slough. Its name, which may have been Iona, is only one of the mysteries of this short-lived colony.¹⁴ There is more evidence about the Bellamy Colony, a community of mostly Norwegian settlers that existed in Lincoln County from late 1897 to mid-1889.¹⁵ The third community, New Era, was located eighteen miles south of Portland along the Willamette River. New Era was a Spiritualist colony that existed for several years but left little documentation.¹⁶

Included in the documentation of the Aurora Colony are several maps and plats of individual property, including this map from 1878.

OHS neg., OrHi 44102

Other nineteenth-century communities in Oregon left little other than an announcement here or there of their presumed existence. Hopeland, for example, is described in the broadside "Rules to be observed by all the residents of Hopeland, Oregon," printed sometime in the 1880s.¹⁷ In the early twentieth century, other attempts to establish utopian experiments were undertaken — including Takota City, a Japanese Buddhist agrarian community near Salem — but these have also not been well documented.¹⁸ Even more difficult to track are communities that may or may not have actually existed, such as the proposed community in Umatilla County reported in the January 15, 1904, Pendleton East Oregonian. The headline reads: "May Bring a Colony — J. S. Cowen of Minnesota, Well Pleased with Prospects in Umatilla County." Details in the brief article note:

Mr. Cowen is on a tour of inspection throughout the Northwest and will locate where there seems to be the most promising opening for such an enterprise and it is possible he will select Umatilla county as the destination of his people. He wishes to locate a colony of about 15 families on farming lands, as near together as possible, and left this morning for Spokane, but will return in a few days to look further in Eastern Oregon before locating permanently.¹⁹

Further details of this endeavor have yet to be uncovered, highlighting the particular challenges of documenting communities whose existence might have been obliterated by physical, social, or cultural circumstances.

Documentation challenges are common to any historical inquiry. In fact, it is the hunt for documentation that serves as the core of historical research. In determining whether or not documentation exists researchers must ask the following, seemingly simple, questions:

If the documentation exists, where is it located and is it accessible? What is the physical condition of the documentation?
    Much documentation from the Aurora Colony is concentrated in two or three major collections. There is also important documentation that resides with descendants of the colonists and other individuals, which has not been formally recorded and is not readily available to researchers. Documents in both repositories and private collections, particularly those of the nineteenth century, need preservation. For most other utopian experiments in Oregon, the existence of documentation, its location, and its physical condition are all problematic.

If the documentation does not currently exist, did it ever? If it did exist, where did it exist and what happened to it?
    The "chest full" of correspondence that Hendricks noted is an example of this type of situation. Perhaps Hendricks's chest is related to a "black box" of documents from the Aurora Colony that Clark M. Will and Frederick W. Skiff examined in 1935 at the home of one of the colony descendants. Years later, Will sought to track these documents and learned that they were probably destroyed in a fire.²⁰

If documentation does not exist, by what other means has information been disseminated about the research topic?
    Since many of the utopian experiments in Oregon (and elsewhere) did not document their experiences, much of their history has been passed along through other means, including newspaper reports and, more commonly, oral tradition and family lore. Oral histories can be a valuable resource, but there have been few, if any, oral history projects related to the utopian heritage of Oregon.²¹

The existence of documentation is just one of the major challenges in tracking the ideal in Oregon, but it obviously is one of the most critical.

A more basic aspect of documentation that applies to the utopian heritage in Oregon is language itself. Of the few colonies identified thus far from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, German, Russian, Hebrew, Norwegian, and Japanese are among the languages required to read and interpret the associated documentation. Because many of these communities attracted individuals from several other countries with languages other than their own (or English), multiple languages were used in documents. Furthermore, much of the written descriptions of life and activities in these communities exist only in letters to family and friends in native lands or elsewhere in the United States. That trail of documentation is a particularly difficult one to track, but there are ways in which efforts might be made to obtain the information.

The challenges of documentation exist not only for the communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also for the plethora of utopian experiments that grew like mushrooms in Oregon in the 1960s and 1970s. I currently have identified over 140 "communes" and related entities in Oregon after 1965.²² Some of these, such as Alpha Farm, continue to exist three decades after their founding, but most were short lived, even phantom-like.²³ Because people at such communities generally did not document their efforts, a challenge in documenting Oregon's utopian heritage is finding other means to record and track their endeavors.²⁴

Over the past three decades, scholars have brought to light challenges in documenting specific aspects of the human experience. In 1973, Eva Mosely wrote that documenting the history of women in America "entails difficulties akin to those encountered in documenting the histories of other neglected groups."²⁵ Two decades later, Timothy J. Gilfoyle examined "Problems and Possibilities in Documenting the History of Sexuality," specifically looking at the issues in researching prostitution.²⁶ These two studies, although examining topics much different from utopias, highlight many of the same problems involved in tracking the quest for a perfect society. In addition to issues surrounding the existence of documentation and its location, Mosely and Gilfoyle identify challenges that include the destruction of public records and, conversely, the sheer volume of records. In tracking communal settlements, public records are often one of the few sources for locating the sites, determining acquisition or sale of property, and, as has been the case with several of the Oregon communities, following court cases and decisions related to land or other disputes. Federal and state records generally are easier to track (although wading through them is still a challenge), but records on other levels (municipal, county, and so forth) more often present problems. Privacy issues, including personal privacy rights of individuals and families and mandated confidential limitations, are also a concern in dealing with documentation. Other challenges focus on how individuals have viewed their own documents. As Mosely notes in her examination of women in archives, "Women themselves have often considered their papers trivia and treated them accordingly. Many papers have been lost forever, while others exist only as spotty or scattered bits and pieces."²⁷ Similar situations might exist for individuals associated with the utopian experience in Oregon. Even those individuals who are involved in keeping alive the history of utopian communities may not be aware of the value of the documentation associated with these endeavors.

A more troubling challenge, as Mosely points out, is one that is rooted in what might be considered a bias of historians and archivists "both toward who makes history and toward what activities are historically significant."²⁸ Mosely is addressing the issue of women's history in America, but the same assessment can be applied to tracking the utopian heritage in Oregon. Mosely's assessment was made in the early phase of the movement called the new social history, and during the past thirty years the view of what constitutes history and what should be retained in repositories has widened considerably. The lack of documentation about utopian endeavors is a result of the uncertainty among historians and archivists about where this creature falls within the realm of research and documentation. As Paul S. Boyer notes in the foreword to America's Communal Utopias, "American utopian communities have not fared well at the hands of historians."²⁹

These colonies, settlements, and communes are difficult to categorize and, Boyer continues, "American historians have had difficulty making sense of the nation's utopian tradition."³⁰ This uncertainty has resulted in an uneven retention of documents related to these enterprises. There are indications, however, that a change has taken place in these views during the last three decades of the twentieth century. The establishment of scholarly organizations such as the National Historic Communal Societies Association in 1975 (renamed the Communal Studies Association in 1990), the Society for Utopian Studies in 1976, and the International Communal Studies Association in 1985 helped bring to light the significance of these utopian experiments.³¹ The monumental effort of Karl J.R. Arndt in compiling and editing A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, 1814–1824, set a benchmark for other documentation efforts.³²

Related challenges in documenting the history of utopian communities are the biases held by the general population about the nature of these activities. The question that Boyer asks with regard to "the paucity of serious scholarly consideration of these communal ventures" might also be applied to popular views: "Is not the 'communal' impulse vaguely unpatriotic?"³³ The "radical" nature of these communal experiments made them targets of derision and ridicule, although many of these communities were far from radical. They were different, which resulted in some level of popular interest; but it was, as Donald Pitzer suggests, an interest that was "unsophisticated, sensationalistic, or sentimentalized." Pitzer goes on to state: "Communal experimenters have often been portrayed simply as colorful 'freaks,' psychological misfits outside the 'mainstream' who inevitably 'failed' because they allegedly were out of step with American life and values."³⁴ Potentially as a result of these views, individuals who were involved with these experiences or who had knowledge of or documentation about them were less likely to acknowledge their connections and, in extreme situations, destroyed documents, artifacts, and other ties with those efforts. This has led to a certain level of "cultural suppression" of documentation related to the utopian experience in Oregon and elsewhere.³⁵

Some of the potential "suppression" of the documentation of, or even the recognized affiliation with, these endeavors is related to the terminology used to describe them. In his 1901 study, "Co-operative Communities in the United States," Alexander Kent offered three categories to describe these communities: communistic, socialistic, and partially cooperative. The first two terms already had some potential for misinterpretation in the early twentieth century; and as that century progressed, they became increasingly weighted terms in the American vocabulary. Although "communistic" or "communist" can be an accurate way to describe some of the colonies, the term clearly had the potential to be misconstrued.³⁶ Kent defined communistic colonies as "those which aim at the widest possible community of goods, and which seem to have both labor and income equality distributed among the members."³⁷ While these colonies shared some beliefs with Communists, few, if any, of the early communal activities in Oregon were tied to the ideological tenets of Communism.

Similarly, "socialistic" communities, which Kent defines as "those which aim at collective ownership of all the means of production, and at equitable rather than equal distribution," mirror aspects of broader Socialist thought — both New Odessa and the Bellamy Colony are classified as socialistic — but in its application to most communal settlements the term does not reflect a strong political ideology.³⁸ Other terms associated with these settlements — including "collective" and, increasingly, "commune" after 1960 — lend themselves to views of radicalism and, as Boyer suggests, being unpatriotic. As a result, even the terminology of utopia can lead to the suppression of affiliation with and documentation of these experiments.

Another challenge in documenting utopia is defining when a settlement is considered utopian. Most of these communities did not call themselves utopian, because the term often conjures up a dreamlike place or an impractical, idealistic vision. Kent offers some boundaries to the categorization, and he bases this "according to their aims rather than their achievements."³⁹ The boundaries of "utopia" are blurry at best, however, and scholars still struggle over where to draw these lines. Being separatist does not necessarily make a group utopian nor does association with a religious sect or ethnic community. Yet, such movements as the Branch Davidians and Jim Jones's Peoples Temple Movement are often included in compilations of communal utopias alongside the Benedictine monks and nuns of Mount Angel and the Trappist monks in Lafayette.⁴⁰ In addition to these various types of intentional communities, one could identify company towns, multiple types of cooperatives, and many other types of social, political, and cultural associations as utopian. The landscape of utopia is not always clear.

The task of documenting the utopian experience in Oregon may be utopian itself, but it is an effort whose time has come. As Paul Boyer concludes, "The men and women who planned these communities, and the thousands who joined them, are at last beginning to find their place in American history."⁴¹ My project of documenting Oregon's utopian heritage is intended to assist in identifying a place in Oregon's history for the many men and women who planned and populated these endeavors at seeking perfection.

Notes

^1. More derived the word "utopia" from the Greek roots — "ou" meaning "no" and "topos" meaning place. He may have been having some humanistic fun by playing on "eu," meaning "good," and "topos," so utopia is either a no place or a good place.

^2. See, for instance, Arthur E. Morgan, Nowhere was Somewhere: How History Makes Utopias and How Utopias Make History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947); and Lorainne Stobbart, Utopia, Fact or Fiction? The Evidence from the Americas (Wolfeboro Falls, N.H.: Alan Sutton, 1992).

^3. See Malcolm Clark, Jr., Eden Seekers: The Settlement of Oregon, 1818–1862 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981).

^4. William L. Lang, "An Eden of Expectations: Oregon Settlers and the Environment They Created," Oregon Humanities (Winter 1992), 28.

^5. See Jeff W. Hayes, Portland, Oregon, A.D. 1999 and Other Sketches (Portland, Ore.: F.W. Baltes, 1913); Howard P. Segal, "Jeff W. Hayes: Reform Boosterism and Urban Utopianism," Oregon Historical Quarterly 79:4 (Winter 1978): 345–57; and Suzanne Elizabeth Reid, Presenting Ursula K. Le Guin (New York: Twayne, 1997).

^6. For studies of utopias in Oregon, see, for example, David Johnson, "Greener Grass: A Short History of Oregon's Utopian Tradition," Oregon Heritage 1:4 (Winter/Spring 1995): 14–17; Elizabeth Amsden, "Communes Rooted in Oregon History," Oregonian, October 11, 1984; and Ione Juanita Beale Harkness, "Certain Community Settlements of Oregon" (M.A. thesis, Univ. of Southern California, 1925), which is important for identifying documentation related to Aurora.

^7. Robert Hendricks, Bethel and Aurora: An Experiment in Communism as Practical Christianity with Some Account of Past and Present Ventures in Collective Living (New York: Press of the Pioneers, 1933), 228. On the "pseudo-historical" nature of Hendricks's work, see Philip H. Parrish's review of the book in Oregon Historical Quarterly 34:4 (December 1933): 374.

^8. See William Alfred Hinds, American Communities: Brief Sketches of Economy, Zoar, Bethel, Aurora, Amana, Icaria, the Shakers, Oneida, Wallingford, and the Brotherhood of the New Life (Oneida, N.Y.: Office of the American Socialist, 1878), 39–48, and his second revised edition, American Communities and Co-operative Colonies (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1908), 326–39. Also see Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States ... (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1875); Frederick Woodward Skiff, Adventures in Americana: Recollections of Forty Years Collecting Books, Furniture, China, Guns and Glass (Portland, Ore.: Metropolitan Press, 1935), 200–23; Clark M. Will, The Story of Old Aurora (n.p.: author, 1982); and Eugene Edmund Snyder, Aurora, Their Last Utopia: Oregon's Christian Commune, 1856–1883 (Portland, Ore.: Binford & Mort, 1993). Many theses and articles have been written on the Aurora Colony.

^9. Information on the Old Aurora Colony Museum and the Aurora Colony Historical Society can be found at www.auroracolonymuseum.com.

^10. Several of Will's illustrations can be found in Skiff, Adventures in Americana.

^11. See Alexander Kent, "Co-operative Communities in the United States," Bulletin of the Department of Labor 35 (July 1901): 563–646; Frederick A. Bushee, "Communistic Societies in the United States," Political Science Quarterly 20:4 (December 1905): 625–64. Ralph Albertson, A Survey of Mutualistic Communities in America (1936; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1973); Robert S. Fogarty, Dictionary of American Communal and Utopian History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980); Yaacov Oved, Two Hundred Years of American Communes (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1988); Timothy Miller, American Communes, 1860–1960: A Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1990); Donald E. Pitzer, ed., America's Communal Utopias (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Foster Stockwell, Encyclopedia of American Communes, 1663–1963 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1998). Also see Robert P. Sutton, Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Religious Communities, 1732–2000 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003); and Sutton, Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Secular Communities, 1824–2000 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004).

^12. See Helen E. Blumenthal, "New Odessa, 1882–1887: United We Stand, Divided We Fall" (M.A. thesis, Portland State University, 1975); and Blumenthal, "New Odessa Colony of Oregon, 1882–1886," Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly 14:4 (July 1982): 321–32. Also see George B. Abdill, "New Odessa: Douglas County's Russian Communal Colony," Umpqua Trapper 1:4 (Winter 1965): 10–14, 2:1 (Spring 1966): 16–21; and Uri D. Herscher, Jewish Agricultural Utopias in America, 1880–1910 (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1981), 37–48.

^13. See James J. Kopp, letter to the editor, Oregon Historical Quarterly 104:4 (Winter 2003): 616–77.

^14. See Monica St. Romain, "What Is Mystery of Old Religious Colony?" Newport News-Times, May 29, 1969.

^15. See James J. Kopp, "Looking Backward at Edward Bellamy's Influence in Oregon, 1888–1936," Oregon Historical Quarterly 104:1 (Spring 2003): 85–7. Also see James J. Kopp and Carol Ginter, "Seeking Prosperity and Freedom on the Oregon Coast: The Bellamy Colony, Lincoln County, Oregon (1897–1899)," Communal Societies 25 (forthcoming, 2005).

^16. See Johnson, "Greener Grass," 15. This colony may have been part of a broader movement called the Brotherhood of Light Movement or the New Era Union Movement, and it may also have been influenced by Charles W. Caryl's New Era,... (Denver, Colo.: [Author], [1897]). See Pitzer, ed., America's Communal Utopias, 455, 480.

^17. A copy of the Hopeland broadside is available at the Multnomah County Library, Portland, Oregon, and on the Library of Congress, American Memory Project Web site, "An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera," memory.loc.gov/ammem/rbpehtml/pehome.html.

^18. More is known of the Holy Rollers of Corvallis, sometimes included as a utopian group, examined in T. McCracken and Robert B. Blodgett, Holy Rollers: Murder and Madness in Oregon's Love Cult (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Press, 2002).

^19.Pendleton East Oregonian, January 15, 1904.

^20. "Aurora Colony History — Will, Clark M. — Black Box," Aurora Colony Historical Society collection, Aurora, Oregon.

^21. See Katrine Barber and Janice Dilg, "Documenting Women's History: Using Oral History and the Collaborative Process," Oregon Historical Quarterly 103 (2002): 530–40; and Donna Sinclair and Peter Kopp, "Voices of Oregon: Twenty-Five Years of Professional Oral History of the Oregon Historical Society," Oregon Historical Quarterly 103 (2002): 250–63.

^22. This compilation draws from several sources, including Timothy Miller, The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999); Roy Ald, The Youth Communes (New York: Tower Publications, 1970); Directory of Collectives 1985. West Coast. USA. Canada (Berkeley: The Intercollective, [1985]); and Communities Directory (Langley, Wash.: Fellowship of Intentional Community, 2000).

^23. See Jann Mitchell, "Communal Quest," Oregonian, August 30, 1987; and Wendy Owen, "Cooperative Independence," Sunday Oregonian, December 9, 2001.

^24. Rajneeshpuram, the infamous community established near Antelope in central Oregon in the 1980s, has had numerous books and articles written about it. For other communes in Oregon, see Hal Hartzell, Jr., Birth of a Cooperative: Hoedads, Inc., A Worker Owned Forest Labor Co-op (Eugene, Ore.: Hulogos'I Communications, 1987); Sue, Nelly, Dian, Carol, and Billie, Country Lesbians: The Story of the WomanShare Collective (Grants Pass, Ore.: WomanShare Books, 1976); and chapters in such works as Robert Houriet, Getting Back Together (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1971) {High Ridge Farm and the Family of the Mystic Arts], and Hugh Gardner, The Children of Prosperity: Thirteen Modern American Communes (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978) [Talsalsan, Crook's Creek, and "Saddle Ridge Farm," a pseudonymic name for a community in southern Oregon]. The Family of Mystic Arts was featured (anonymously) as the cover story in Life: see John Stickney and John Olson, "The Commune Comes to America," Life, July 18, 1969.

^25. Eva Mosely, "Women in Archives: Documenting the History of Women in America," American Archivist 36:2 (April 1973): 215.

^26. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, "Prostitutes in the Archives: Problems and Possibilities in Documenting the History of Sexuality," American Archivist 57:3 (Summer 1994): 514–27.

^27. Mosely, "Women in Archives," 215.

^28. Ibid, 216.

^29. Paul S. Boyer, foreword to Pitzer, ed., America's Communal Utopias, x.

^30. Ibid, xi.

^31. See Pitzer, ed., America's Communal Utopias, xv–xvi.

^32. Karl J.R. Arndt, A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, 1814–1824, vol. 1, 1814–1819, vol. 2, 1820–1824 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1975, 1978).

^33. Boyer, foreword to Pitzer, ed., America's Communal Utopias, x.

^34. Pitzer, ed., America's Communal Utopias, 5.

^35. I borrow the term "cultural suppression" from Gail Lee Dubrow, who has used it to describe suppression of Japanese characteristics in the architecture of the Pacific Northwest. See, for instance, Gail Lee Dubrow, "Deru Kugi Wa Utareru, or the Nail That Sticks up Gets Hit: The Architecture of Japanese American Identity, 1885–1942, the Rural Environment," Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 19:4 (Winter 2002): 319–33. Also see Gail Dubrow with Donna Graves, Sento at Sixth and Main: Preserving Landmarks of Japanese American Heritage (Seattle: Seattle Arts Commission, 2002), and Dubrow, "The Nail That Sticks up Gets Hit: The Architecture of Japanese American Identity in the Urban Environment, 1884–1942," in Nikkei (dis)Appearances: Twentieth-Century Japanese American and Japanese Canadian History in the Pacific Northwest, ed. Louis Fiset and Gail Nomura (Seattle: University of Washington Press, forthcoming).

^36. The Aurora Colony was one such endeavor viewed as "communistic." See John E. Simon, "William Keil and Communist Colonies," Oregon Historical Quarterly 36:2 (June 1935): 119–53.

^37. Kent, "Co-operative Communities," 563.

^38. Ibid.

^39. Ibid.

^40. See, for instance, Pitzer, ed., America's Communal Utopias, 452, 454–5, 457, 482; Lawrence J. McCrank, "Religious Orders and Monastic Communalism in America," in Pitzer, ed., America's Communal Utopias, 204–52.

^41. Boyer, foreword to Pitzer, ed., America's Communal Utopias, xiii.

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