Home | |
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Unincorporated community (CDP) | |
![]() The Home Welcome Sign | |
Coordinates: 47°16′37″N122°45′58″W / 47.27694°N 122.76611°W | |
Country | United States |
State | Washington |
County | Pierce |
Population (2010) | |
• Total | 1,377 |
Time zone | UTC-8 (Pacific (PST)) |
• Summer (DST) | UTC-7 (PDT) |
ZIP code | 98349 [1] |
Area code | 253 |
Home is a census-designated place in Pierce County, Washington, United States. The 2010 Census placed the population at 1,377. The community lies on the Key Peninsula and borders the waters of Carr Inlet, an extension of Puget Sound. Home is now primarily a town of beach homes, although around the turn of the twentieth century, it was considered a model, utopian community of anarchists. [2] [3]
After the failure of the industrial cooperative colony Glennis located east of Eatonville, three former Glennisites — George H. Allen, Oliver A. Verity, and B. F. O'Dell — set out in the summer of 1895 into Puget Sound on a rowboat they built themselves to find an isolated location for a new community. Home was one of about two hundred similar communities that sprung up in America in the late 1800s. [4]
They decided upon Von Geldern Cove (also known as Joe's Bay) as the site for their new Home Colony, which would be an intentional community based on anarchist philosophy. The founders purchased 26 acres (110,000 m2) there at $7 an acre, working odd jobs to pay for it. By 1896, their families had joined them and cabins were constructed. [5]
By 1898 a land buying corporation was set up called the Mutual Home Association, whose Articles of Incorporation and Agreement stated their purpose as "to assist its members in obtaining and building homes for themselves and to aid in establishing better social and moral conditions." Land was apportioned to those who became members of the Association, agreeing to its anarchist ideals and to pay for their lot. [6] The title to each member's land would stay with the Association; however this was changed in 1909. The Association also held title to a meeting hall, called Liberty Hall, and a trading post.
When Home was plotted in 1901 it had increased in size to 217 acres (0.88 km2) and had become home to anarchists, communists, food faddists, freethinkers, nudists, and others who did not fit in with mainstream society. Elbert Hubbard, anarchist Emma Goldman, and national communist leader William Z. Foster visited and gave lectures. [7]
Some high-profile anarchists and free thinkers lived, raised families and wrote about the free thinking anarchist movement in Home. Such individuals brought their share of scandal and intrigue to the community. One such figure was Gertie Vose, who once lived in Portland and contributed to The Firebrand (alongside other notable anarchists like Jay Fox and Emma Goldman). Her move to the Home colony was thought to be motivated by her son, Donald Vose. He was said to be a shy, lonely kid and Gertie thought a move to the anarchist friendly area would improve his social skills and make him more comfortable with her beliefs. Gertie quickly established her place in this community by contributing to one of Home's newspapers, The Discontent, and by organizing meetings and entertaining visitors. Gertie Vose also became good friends with fellow anarchist and writer, Emma Goldman. They kept in touch for many years and Goldman wrote about her friendship with Gertie and her less amiable relationship with Donald. Donald Vose was a less harmonious addition to the community which contrasted with his mother's flourishing role in the colony. He was described as "irresponsible, lazy and bumblingly inept at everything he tried." [8] Home was showing signs of splintering as people with differing views and ideology began to separate and disperse.
Following the assassination of President McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901, the community came under scrutiny from outsiders, especially newspapers in nearby Tacoma. Inflammatory articles led to threats being made by a vigilante committee called the Loyal League formed by members of the Grand Army of the Republic, who planned to invade the colony by steamboat and "put it to the torch." They were stopped when the steamboat owner refused to take them. [9]
In 1902, after charges of violation of the Comstock Act resulting from an article advocating free-love published in the local anarchist newspaper Discontent: Mother of Progress , Home's post office was closed by postal inspectors and moved two miles (3.2 km) to the smaller town of Lakebay. The people of Home were labeled "vicious" by officials, and thus people like the citizens of Tacoma, Washington believed the community was detrimental to moral values. [4]
The radical feminist Lois Waisbrooker was a resident of Home during a later phase of her controversial career (1901 to 1904), and was involved in the prosecution that led to the closing of the Home post office. [10] Emma Goldman was also a radical ideologue who studied the works of people like Walt Whitman and thus disseminated the idea of "sexual intermediacy". [11] Waisbrooker and Goldman and other women like them exemplified feminist ideology that fit into the larger anarchist canon that had developed in 20th century America.
The Association became divided into disagreeing factions called "nudes" and "prudes." The two factions were coined in a series of editorials in the Home newspaper The Agitator in which editor Jay Fox defended Homeites arrested in 1911 for nude swimming — and nude swimming in general — against those in Home who had reported them to county authorities. This division between conservative and more liberal factions of the colony contributed greatly to the colony's decline in 1919. Because of these editorials, Fox was charged with the misdemeanor of encouraging or advocating disrespect for law or for any court or courts of justice and jailed for two months. Not only was the colony fracturing from within but public opinion outside of Home was less than favorable. [12] Many people saw the disagreement totally arbitrary seeing as it was discussing people being nude in public and that was socially unacceptable outside of the community. The Agitator ran stories that dealt with things like the Hay Market riot in Chicago and other instances of injustice against the anarchist movement. When Jay Fox moved from Home, WA to Chicago he took his paper with him and renamed it The Syndicalist.
The debate over Home's clothing-optional policies was a common theme in communities like this across the country. In most cases the free-love lifestyle that anarchists strived for came into conflict with the strict cultural norms of the mainstream. These communities "withered as a result of public hostility as well as internal disagreement over ideology and practice." [13]
As people in the colony became more divided on their views of anarchism the colony began to fracture. The "nudes and prudes" debate made it clear that the colony was not living in a cohesive utopia, but rather a complicated collection of similar people who could not fully reconcile their differing interpretations of anarchism. In 1919 the Association was dissolved and the anarchist community, as it was, dissolved as well. The July 27, 1919, Omaha Daily Bee reported the event as "Free Love Colony Dissolved by Court." [14]
Emma Goldman was a Lithuanian-born anarchist revolutionary, political activist, and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
Freeland is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) on Whidbey Island in Island County, Washington, United States. At the time of the 2010 census the population was 7,812. The town received its name based on its origins as a socialist commune in the early 1900s: in the eyes of its founders, the land of the town was literally to be free for all people. Some of the first settlers were veterans of a prior experiment in socialism, the nearby Equality Colony.
Edison is a census-designated place (CDP) in Skagit County, Washington, United States. The population was 133 at the 2010 census. It is included in the Mount Vernon–Anacortes, Washington Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Alexander Berkman was a Russian-American anarchist and author. He was a leading member of the anarchist movement in the early 20th century, famous for both his political activism and his writing.
Burley is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Kitsap County, Washington, United States. It is located just north of the boundary with Pierce County, about halfway between Gig Harbor to the south and Port Orchard to the north. It is located at the head of the Burley Lagoon in Henderson Bay. Burley is a residential area. The community's population stood at 2,057 at the 2010 census.
Equality Colony was a United States socialist colony founded in Skagit County, Washington by a political organization known as the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth in 1897. It was meant to serve as a model which would convert the rest of Washington and later the entire continent to socialism.
Lois Waisbrooker was an American feminist author, editor, publisher, and campaigner of the later nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. She wrote extensively on issues of sex, marriage, birth control, and women's rights, plus related areas of radical thought like free speech, anarchism and spiritualism. She is perhaps best remembered for her 1893 novel A Sex Revolution.
Harry May Kelly (1871–1953) was an American anarchist and lifelong activist in the Modern School movement.
The Fellowship Farm Cooperative Association was a Utopian anarchist community in the Stelton section of Piscataway Township, New Jersey that was started in 1912.
The Social Democracy of America (SDA), later known as the Cooperative Brotherhood, was a short lived political party in the United States that sought to combine the planting of an intentional community with political action in order to create a socialist society. It was an organizational forerunner of both the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and the Burley, Washington cooperative socialist colony.
The Socialist Party of Washington was the Washington state section of the Socialist Party of America (SPA), an organization originally established as a federation of semi-autonomous state organizations.
Jay Fox was an American journalist, trade unionist, and political activist. The political trajectory of his life ran through anarchism, syndicalism, and communism, and he played a significant role in each of these political movements.
Samuel Tellefson Hammersmark was an American book publisher, trade union organizer, political activist, and Communist Party functionary. Hammersmark is best remembered as a political lieutenant of William Z. Foster in the Chicago anarcho-syndicalist and communist movements of the 1910s through the 1930s and as a candidate of the Communist Party for public office.
Cyrus Field Willard was an American journalist, political activist, and theosophist. Deeply influenced by the writing of Edward Bellamy, Willard is best remembered as a principal in several utopian socialist enterprises, including the late 1890s colonization efforts of the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth (BCC).
Leonard Abbott was an anarchist and socialist best known for co-founding the Stelton Colony and related Ferrer Association in the 1910s.
Home Colony was an anarchist colony on Puget Sound in Washington State from 1898 to 1909. Its founders were members of a former Bellamyite colony who bought 26 acres and formally organized as the Mutual Home Association in January 1898. Colonists purchased one or two acres and the proceeds purchased new land for the colony. Its colonists lived as individuals rather than cooperatively and tolerated a wide degree of social practices, including free love, free speech. They organized few cooperative institutions aside from a cooperative store (1902), some mutual construction projects, and a weekly anarchist paper, Discontent: Mother of Progress. When the newspaper was fined for obscenity, they replaced it with The Demonstrator. The original 40 colonists grew to 91 by 1900 and 155 by 1906. The colony's numerous visiting speakers included Emma Goldman. Following 1909 changes to the association's articles of incorporation allowed land to transfer from their mutual trust to private ownership, Home declined as a cooperative community but remained a home for anarchists.
Lucy Fox Robins Lang was an American activist involved with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the fight for amnesty for political prisoners. She is best known for her work with Emma Goldman and Samuel Gompers. Lang advocated for many political prisoners who had been charged under Wartime Emergency Laws. She was also a Zionist who helped raise money for settlements for Jewish refugees. Lang wrote about her life in an autobiography, Tomorrow is Beautiful (1948).
The Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club (PSJBGC) is a Puget Sound Area gun club, formerly affiliated with Redneck Revolt. During the George Floyd protests in June 2020, the group attended the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle.