Franklin Community | |
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  Location of Haverstraw in New York | |
| Coordinates: 41°11′47″N73°58′01″W / 41.19639°N 73.96694°W Coordinates: 41°11′47″N73°58′01″W / 41.19639°N 73.96694°W |
The Franklin Community was the first American Owenite community established in New York state. Founded in 1826 two miles from the Hudson River near the town of Haverstraw in Rockland County, the enterprise stumbled in its first year of existence and was terminated later that same year.
The arrival of Welsh social reformer Robert Owen on American shores in the fall of 1824 was met with public curiosity and expectation. Owen's ideas about the relationship between human behavior and happiness and the material conditions of their existence were familiar to intellectuals in the United States from about 1817, when they were publicized in various British reviews. [1] In response, those favoring the communitarian ideal had established an organization called the New York Society for Promoting Communities, a group headed by a Quaker apothecary named Cornelius C. Blatchly. [1] It would be Blatchly and his associates who would welcome Owen to New York on November 4, 1824, [1] presenting the visitor with a copy of the group's 1822 publication extracting Owen's writings, Essay on Common Wealths. [2]
A great popular interest surrounded Owen's arrival and subsequent announcement that he had purchased an entire established community in the state of Indiana from the Harmony Society for $140,000, with a view to establishing a model community to test his social theories in the crucible of practice. [3] Despite — or perhaps due to — the distance between New York and the Owenite example on the American frontier in Indiana, interest grew in establishment parallel communities elsewhere.
Despite the existence of the New York Society for Promoting Communities, it would not be the formal authority behind the creation of an Owenite colony; instead it would be a group of committed freethinkers from the New York City area, including atheist leader George Houston, who had previously suffered imprisonment in England for his anti-deist writings. [4]
In the spring of 1826 the Franklin Community was founded, with a preparatory constitution approved in March and a site selected the following month. [4] The site selected was located about two miles from the Hudson River near the town of Haverstraw in Rockland County, New York. Included were 120 or 130 acres of farmland, with a purchase price of $16,000 or $18,000 stipulated. [5] The enterprise was named in honor of Benjamin Franklin (1709-1790), one of the founding fathers of the American republic.
George Houston was named secretary of the new Owenite community. [4] Families began to move in immediately, beginning to farm the land early in May 1826. [6] Many believed that their so-called "sweat equity" (to borrow a modern phrase) would be sufficient to attain membership in the community. [6] Deprived of access to Robert Owen's purse, the fledgling community found it difficult to raise funds, only managing to raise the necessary one-third downpayment on June 23, 1826. [6] A financial restructuring was required and the constitution was altered shortly thereafter to require a cash payment in exchange for community membership — a change which resulted in the great unhappiness of early participants, who felt themselves cheated and robbed of their pioneering labor. [6] 190 years later the house stands today in the town of Haverstraw on the outskirts of the village of West Haverstraw. An article exists in the local paper titled "The short and unhappy life of a backwoods Utopia" by Isabelle Savell
Adding to the discord was the arrival of Houston and his atheist associates, who immediately set about secularizing the community's schools, encouraging Sunday labor in violation of Biblical precepts, and establishing a "Church of Reason" — backing their actions with anti-religious quotations from Robert Owen's written works. [6]
Underfinanced and wracked with discord, the Franklin Community failed about five months after the launch of the venture. [6]
Former secretary of the Franklin Community George Houston would found a new rationalist journal in January 1827, called The Correspondent. [4] Houston would be joined in his editorial task by Abner Kneeland, whose subsequent trial for blasphemy would prove to be one of the landmark political events of the decade of the 1830s. [4]
Communitarianism is a philosophy that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community. Its overriding philosophy is based upon the belief that a person's social identity and personality are largely molded by community relationships, with a smaller degree of development being placed on individualism. Although the community might be a family, communitarianism usually is understood, in the wider, philosophical sense, as a collection of interactions, among a community of people in a given place, or among a community who share an interest or who share a history. Communitarianism usually opposes extreme individualism and disagrees with extreme laissez-faire policies that neglect the stability of the overall community.
Rockland County is the southernmost county on the west side of the Hudson River in the U.S. state of New York, part of the New York City metropolitan statistical area. It is a suburb of New York City that is about 6 miles from the Bronx at their closest points. The county's population, as of the 2010 United States Census, was 311,687, increasing to a 2019 Census estimate of 325,789, making it the third-most densely populated county outside New York City within New York. The county seat is New City. Rockland County is accessible via the New York State Thruway, which crosses the Hudson to Westchester at the Tappan Zee Bridge ten exits up from the Bronx, as well as the Palisades Parkway five exits up from the George Washington Bridge. The county's name derives from "rocky land", as the area has been aptly described, largely due to the Hudson River Palisades.
New Harmony is a historic town on the Wabash River in Harmony Township, Posey County, Indiana. It lies 15 miles (24 km) north of Mount Vernon, the county seat, and is part of the Evansville metropolitan area. The town's population was 789 at the 2010 census.
Haverstraw is a village incorporated in 1854 in the town of Haverstraw in Rockland County, New York, United States. It is located north of Congers, southeast of West Haverstraw, east of Garnerville, northeast of New City, and west of the Hudson River at its widest point. According to the 2019 U.S. Census estimate, the population was 12,045, an increase from the 2010 Census population of 11,910.
Haverstraw is a town in Rockland County, New York, United States, located north of the Town of Clarkstown and the Town of Ramapo; east of Orange County, New York; south of the Town of Stony Point; and west of the Hudson River. The town runs from the west to the east border of the county in its northern part. The population was 36,634 at the 2010 census. The name comes from the Dutch word Haverstroo meaning "oats straw", referring to the grasslands along the river. The town contains three villages, one of which is also known as Haverstraw. Haverstraw village is the original seat of government for the town, hosting the area's historic central downtown business district and the densest population in northern Rockland County.
Robert Owen was a Welsh textile manufacturer, philanthropist and social reformer, and a founder of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement. He made efforts to improve his factory's working conditions, promoted experimental socialistic communities, and proposed a more collective approach to child rearing, including government control of education. He gained wealth in the early 1800s as an investor and then manager of a textile mill at New Lanark, Scotland. He had trained initially as a draper in Stamford, Lincolnshire and worked in London before relocating aged 18 to Manchester and textile manufacturing. In 1824, he moved to America and invested most of his fortune in an experimental socialistic community at New Harmony, Indiana, as a preliminary model for Owen's Utopian society. It lasted about two years; other Owenite Utopian communities likewise failed. In 1828, Owen returned to London, where he continued to champion the working class, lead the development of cooperatives and the trade union movement, and support the passage of child labour laws and free co-educational schools.
The Nashoba Community was an experimental project of Frances "Fanny" Wright, initiated in 1825 to educate and emancipate slaves. It was located in a 2,000-acre (8 km²) woodland on the side of present-day Germantown, Tennessee, a Memphis suburb, along the Wolf River. It was a small-scale test of her full-compensation emancipation plan in which no slaveholders would lose money for emancipating slaves. Instead, Wright proposed that, through a system of unified labor, the slaves would buy their freedom and then be transported to Haiti or the settlements which would become Liberia.
Owenism is the utopian socialist philosophy of 19th-century social reformer Robert Owen and his followers and successors, who are known as Owenites. Owenism aimed for radical reform of society and is considered a forerunner of the cooperative movement. The Owenite movement undertook several experiments in the establishment of utopian communities organized according to communitarian and cooperative principles. One of the best known of these efforts, which were largely unsuccessful, was the project at New Harmony, Indiana, which started in 1825 and was abandoned by 1829. Owenism is also closely associated with the development of the British trade union movement, and with the spread of the Mechanics' Institute movement.
The North American Phalanx was a secular utopian socialist commune located in Colts Neck Township, Monmouth County, New Jersey. The community was the longest-lived of about 30 Fourierist Associations in the United States which emerged during a brief burst of popularity during the decade of the 1840s.
John Goodwyn Barmby was born at Yoxford in Suffolk and educated at Woodbridge School. He was an English Victorian utopian socialist thinker. He and his wife Catherine Barmby were influential supporters of Robert Owen in the late 1830s and early 1840s before moving into the radical Unitarian stream of Christianity in the 1840s. Both had established reputations as staunch feminists and proposed the addition of women's suffrage to the demands of the Chartist movement.
Arthur Eugene Bestor Jr. was a historian of the United States, and during the 1950s a noted critic of American public education.
Fourierism is the systematic set of economic, political, and social beliefs first espoused by French intellectual Charles Fourier (1772–1837). Based upon a belief in the inevitability of communal associations of people who worked and lived together as part of the human future, Fourier's committed supporters referred to his doctrines as associationism. Political contemporaries and subsequent scholarship has identified Fourier's set of ideas as a form of utopian socialism—a phrase that retains mild pejorative overtones.
Charles Southwell was a radical English journalist and freethinker and colonial advocate.
Wanborough is a former settlement in Edwards County, Illinois, United States. Wanborough was 2 miles (3.2 km) west of Albion.
Abram Combe was a British utopian socialist, an associate of Robert Owen and a major figure in the early co-operative movement, leading one of the earliest Owenite communities, at Orbiston, Scotland.
Margaret Chappellsmith (1806–1883) was a socialist lecturer, active in London, England and the United States of America in the 19th Century. She campaigned on communitarianism, currency reform and the women's position.
Utopian socialism is the term often used to describe the first current of modern socialism and socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, and Robert Owen. Utopian socialism is often described as the presentation of visions and outlines for imaginary or futuristic ideal societies, with positive ideals being the main reason for moving society in such a direction. Later socialists and critics of utopian socialism viewed utopian socialism as not being grounded in actual material conditions of existing society and in some cases as reactionary. These visions of ideal societies competed with Marxist-inspired revolutionary social democratic movements.
Haverstraw Beach State Park is a 73-acre (0.30 km2) state park located in the Town of Haverstraw in Rockland County, New York. The park is included within the Palisades Interstate Park system and is functionally part of a continuous complex of parks that also includes Rockland Lake State Park, Hook Mountain State Park, and Nyack Beach State Park.