Kaweah Colony
The Kaweah Colony was a socialist commune in Tulare County in the Sierra Nevada . The colony existed from 1886 to 1892 and was influenced by the writings of Laurence Gronlund and Edward Bellamy . The group led by Burnette G. Haskell (1857-1907) and James J. Martin settled in 1886 on the banks of the Kaweah River . At no time did you have more than 500 members, of which up to 300, but mostly only 50-75 members were present in Kaweah, while some lived in the east of the USA and Europe and supported the colony financially. Membership was $ 500, of which at least $ 100 had to be paid in cash and the remainder in kind and labor.
The municipality planned to exploit the coniferous and giant sequoia stocks and began building a road from a sawmill planned in the forest to a pressing plant where the wood would be processed. The original plan for a railway could not be financed.
The logging licenses that had been applied for, some of which had already been used, were refused when the Sequoia National Park was founded on September 25, 1890 , in the future area of which the members of the community had settled as squatters . Appeal proceedings and claims for compensation were rejected. The colonists were expelled from the national park in 1891 and brought to justice for illegal logging. This led to the dissolution of the municipality in 1892. A relic of the municipality is a log cabin, the Squatter's Cabin , the 1977 National Register of Historic Places under monument protection was provided.
The commune named General Sherman Tree, discovered in 1879, after Karl Marx . The national park administration named the tree again after General Sherman. Some of the colonists stayed in Tulare County after the dissolution.
literature
- Jay O'Connell: Co-Operative Dreams: A History of The Kaweah Colony , ISBN 0-9673370-0-3
- Robert V. Hine: California's Utopian Colonies , San Marino, California, Huntington Library, 1953, pp. 78-100
Web links
- The Kaweah Commonwealth Online
- Thomas L. Burge, Ward Eldredge, William C. Tweed: United States Park Service: The Kaweah Colony Utopia and Sequoia National Park (3 pages pdf; 254 kB)
- Kaweah country
- Kaweah , Beincke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Individual evidence
- ↑ American Exploration and Settlement , from Lorin E. Berryman, and Albert B. Elasser: Terminus Reservoir. Geology, Paleontology, Flora & Fauna, Archeology, History , Inter-Agency Archeological Salvage Program by the US Army Corps of Engineers in cooperation with the National Park Service, 1966, virtual reprint Smithsonian Institution, September 8, 2008
- ↑ John Elliott and Sarah Barton Elliott: The History of Kaweah Colony ( Memento of the original from April 15, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , The Kaweah Commonwealth, December 23, 2010
- ↑ National Park Service: List of Classified Structures - Squatter's Cabin ( Memento of the original of May 21, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
Coordinates: 36 ° 33 ′ 31 ″ N , 118 ° 45 ′ 9 ″ W.