Eden Within Eden: Oregon's Utopian Heritage

Preface

x Preface I have been seeking utopia in Oregon for over three decades, at least in a scholarly manner. I may have been seeking utopia in Oregon for years prior to that growing up on the eastern side of the Cascade Mountains and then as an undergraduate student at a time when there was a revival of interest in finding Eden, Nirvana, or whatever name one chose to identify their place of perfection. As a native Oregonian I came to feel that there was something special about this land of the empire builders that drew others to this place to seek their own dreams. I became a student of utopianism in both its literary and communal manifestations and, although I took my studies in different directions over the years, I constantly was thinking about how utopia was an important aspect in Oregon’s history. When I finally decided to focus my research on Oregon’s utopian heritage, I initiated a three-phased approach to exploring those attempts to establish Eden within Oregon. The initial phase centered on identifying and documenting communal experiments in Oregon. With support from a research grant from the Oregon Council for the Humanities, and with assistance from libraries across the United States, particularly the Special Collections at the University of Oregon Libraries and the Oregon Historical Society Research Library, I was able to track down information not only on the known utopian endeavors in Oregon, such as the Aurora Colony where I spent considerable time going through the files of the Aurora Colony Historical Society, but also in many new and yet undocumented communal groups. The second phase was to engage in public presentations on the topic and, again with support from the Oregon Council for the Humanities— in particular OCH’s Chautauqua program for which I was selected to participate—my presentation, “Eden Within Eden: Exploring Oregon’s Utopian Heritage,” was offered over thirty times across the state, from Yachats to Enterprise, and from St. Helens to Glendale, from 2003 to 2006. These events were important not only for sharing information about this project but for obtaining information on communal groups and experiments made in the state, particularly since the 1960s, as individuals attending these sessions would often bring to my attention groups that I had not yet identified. As a result of these first two components of my efforts to study Oregon’s utopian heritage I identified nearly three hundred communal experiments attempted, or at least planned in some fashion, since the Aurora Colony was established in 1856. The largest segment of these experiments took place in the revival of communal groups in the 1960s and after, but the roots of a number of these communities can be traced to earlier attempts in Oregon xi Preface and elsewhere. Many of these groups shared the basic belief that the place to attempt these experiments was in Oregon, a place that long had been viewed and described as Eden, or at least resembling elements of what were perceived to be aspects of this paradise known as the Garden of Eden. The third phase of this study is to present these findings in a narrative survey on Oregon’s utopian heritage as well as provide a resource guide on these communal experiments. The document in hand is the result. What follows is an attempt to place Oregon’s utopian heritage in several contexts. First is that there is a longstanding view of Oregon as “Eden” and this created an environment, or at least the impressions of one, that would be receptive to utopian experiments. Another important, and often overlooked, context of Oregon’s utopian heritage is within the broader history of utopianism in American history, from the religious and philosophical roots of the early settlements and the founding of the country, to the outburst of utopian communal societies that were formed in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century and again in the 1960s and later period. There also is the sense that as Oregon commemorates its sesquicentennial that there still exists a spirit of the ideal that served as the basis for not just communal societies within the state but nurtured broader utopian ideas and attitudes. The resource guide that appears as the Appendix is intended to provide the most complete information compiled to date on Oregon’s utopian heritage. But like the text, the intent of this resource guide is as a starting place for continued exploration and discovery of communal groups within Oregon...