| Letters | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 106.4

Letters

To the Editor:

I commend William Alley's article in the Summer 2005 issue, "Grace's Visit to the Rogue River Valley." It is an important contribution to the field of early American cinema and the often overlooked field of regional filmmaking, which takes its cues from local talent and concerns rather than the universals of a national market.

In a footnote at the conclusion of the article, Mr. Alley states that Grace's Visit was "the first feature film made in Oregon." While that statement does not constitute a major claim or focus of the piece, it does require some illumination.

Certainly Grace's Visit was among the earliest feature, or multi-reel, indigenous films to be made promoting Oregon's virtues to the rest of the country. But another preceeded it. Where Cowboy Was King, a five-reel film about the 1914 Pendleton Round Up, was produced by the American Lifeograph Company of Portland and was released for the national market in April 1915.

Thanks to the efforts of the Oregon Historical Society Film Archive, significant portions of it have been preserved, as have a number of newsreels and shorts from the same era.

Ellen S. Thomas

Northwest Film Center
Portland, Oregon

To the Editor:

I read with much interest the letter from Peter Neketin in the Summer 2005 issue of the Quarterly related to the availability of some documentation on the Nehalem Valley Cooperative Colony at the State Archives, which followed up a letter by Ernest Haycox, Jr., in the Winter 2004 issue on the same topic. I am pleased to see such discussion about the documentation of Oregon's utopian endeavors, a topic I addressed in an article in the Summer 2004 issue. As my own research continues in this endeavor, with the gracious assistance of a grant from the Oregon Council for the Humanities, I continue to uncover more information about cooperative societies that may or may not have existed. Some interesting light has been shed on the story of one mysterious "community" that I briefly mentioned in my article, Hopeland, that I thought may be of interest to the readers of this publication.

Thanks to leads provided in some research undertaken in 1992 for a course at Portland State University by Lisa Walker, currently a staff member of the OHS Research Library, I have put together more of the pieces related to this utopian endeavor ("A Selected Bibliography of Sources on Communal Societies in Oregon and Washington Available at the Oregon Historical Society"). The broadside, "Rules to be observed by all the residents of Hopeland, Oregon" (available at the Multnomah County Library and online on the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress), seemed to be about all we had to show us where this settlement might have existed. In fact, the notion of Hopeland was primarily in the mind of a noted Oregon figure and the namesake for a community in Portland — Rev. John Sellwood (1806–1892). In the 1870s, Sellwood sought to establish a "Christian utopia" for those who could meet the rigid rules he set out in his guidelines. Although there are some reports that such a settlement was initiated, most accounts indicate that this never went further than the planning stages.

Fred Lockley, in one of his classic "Impressions and Observations of the Journal Man" that appeared regularly in the Oregon Journal, noted in the June 7, 1936, issue that "The Rev. John Sellwood, prior to the beginning of the town of Sellwood, planned to organize a town, to be known as Hopeland." He also included much of the prospectus of the proposed town. The Oregon City Enterprise-Courier of November 22, 1953 (as Walker identified), included an article by Dale Plumb on Sellwood's "Christian Utopia" in a more lighthearted vein. Plumb suggested that Sellwood "actually started his dream town on land near Champoeg," although the evidence of this is lacking. An article by Evangeline Nyden in The Bee, published in Sellwood on May 15, 1975, focused on the tragic experience of the Sellwood family as they crossed through Panama on their way to Oregon in 1856, but it also includes a brief mention of Hopeland. Nyden writes: "In his desire to improve the lot of his fellow men he designed a plan, a utopian dream to create a perfect village and to use his land grant for the site." She also notes, "It was a quite impracticable plan and nothing ever came of it.... The puritanical restrictions involved were far too unworldly for most of the hardy settlers of a frontier territory and the land he had thought might become his dream 'Christian Settlement' lay undisturbed for more years." The "puritanical restrictions" in the "Rules" included the basic elements of the Ten Commandments but also expanded these to "No dancing parties. — No theatrical representations. — No serenading of newly married persons — No bathing in the river on Sundays nor at any time without having first put on in private a decent bathing suit," and the list goes on.

One of the earliest assessments of Sellwood's dream of a Christian Utopia came in a memorial sermon delivered by the Rev. William H. Stoy in 1892 following the death of the Rev. John Sellwood on August 27, 1892. Included in this twenty-five-page tribute to Sellwood, Stoy provided this summary of the ideas of Hopeland (from A Sermon In Memoriam, Portland, 1892):

But in addition to these ordinary dispensations of considerate and prayerful charity and help, he deeply and seriously entertained and tried hard to perfect a far more extensive and permanent design of aiding and benefiting men temporally, who were willing to accept a rule and live religiously in the conception of what he was pleased to call his "Hopeland." The design was, without a doubt, eutopian, and – in this hurrying, selfish, and irreligious age – impracticable; but it is none the less creditable to his Christian faith and to pious desire to benefit his fellow-men in a heavenward and holy way. His design did not take form nor assume being, because men could not be found to accept it. It is accepted of God all the same, and will be part of his crown of rejoicing in the eternal world.²

Sellwood's "impracticable" utopian scheme was not attempted, but it is still an important chapter in the story of efforts to seek Eden in Oregon. The quest to document other impracticable schemes, some attempted and others not, continues, and I welcome any and all leads and information that readers of the Quarterly might have to share.

James J. Kopp

Lewis & Clark College
Portland

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