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39 CHAPTER THREE The Dawn of Utopia in Oregon: The Aurora Colony Y Y Y Before reaching Oregon City, the town of Aurora may properly claim the attention of the tourist. Here was located, a number of years ago, an experimental German colony. Just upon what basis it was founded, I am unable to say, nor does it particularly matter. The colony system had been virtually abandoned, but in the orchards and vineyards with which these industrious and thrifty men have converted a wilderness to a garden, can be found an instructive hint as to the vast possibilities of the magnificent country through which the tourist has traveled thus far.1 In this fashion A. T. Hawley described the small village of Aurora in 1888. Hawley’s description does not provide many details of Aurora but these few lines capture some important aspects of this settlement along the Pudding River that separates Marion and Clackamas counties. One is that the history of this “experimental German colony” was unknown beyond a few basic facts even in the same decade as the dissolution of the colony in the early 1880s. But even in the mid-1870s, when the colony was still thriving under the leadership of its founder Wilhelm Keil, there was a lack of knowledge and understanding of this communal society. Charles Nordoff, in one of the earliest published accounts of the Aurora Colony in the broader context of American communal settlements, captured a similar perspective. Early in his report of his visit to Aurora, he offers this anecdotal example of how Aurora was perceived: When I mentioned to an acquaintance in Portland my purpose to spend some days at Aurora, he replied, “Oh, yes—Dutchtown; you’ll feed better there than any where else in the state;” and on further inquiry I found that I might expect to see there also the best orchards of Oregon, the ingenious expedients for drying fruits, and an excellent system of agriculture. Beyond these practical points, and the further statement that “these Dutch are a queer people,” information about them is not general among Oregonians.2 In the 1930s, John Simon echoed these earlier observations, noting: “Aurora hides volumes of the most singular and interesting history. It is to be regretted however that so very little of it has been preserved to posterity.”3 Chapter Three 40 In the early twenty-first century, little has changed in terms of knowledge of Aurora’s history and contributions to Oregon’s general history, not to mention its role as the first communal utopian settlement in the state. In fact, most Oregonians would likely not be able to locate or identify Aurora at all.4 Although Hawley dismissed the colony nature of Aurora, his description captures the sense of the Willamette Valley as Eden and “the vast possibilities of the magnificent country.” The Aurora colonists saw these possibilities and developed perhaps the most successful utopian experiment west of the Rocky Mountains in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the Aurora Colony played an important role in several ways in the development and history of the Willamette Valley. One could argue that there were utopian elements in various aspects of Oregon’s history prior to the establishment of Aurora in 1856, including the missionary work of Jason Lee and others. But the followers of Wilhelm Keil who migrated with him from the earlier colony in Bethel, Missouri, by way of Willapa in Washington Territory, were clearly in the utopian tradition. In fact, the Aurora Colony has many links to other utopian experiences of the nineteenth century and very likely with earlier ones as well. The roots of the Aurora Colony can be traced back to some of the same geographic areas and religious and intellectual influences from which some of the earliest communal groups in America sprang. These include the impacts of the Reformation in Europe and the rise of several separatist religious groups among the Germanic people. Similar to George Rapp and the Harmonists are the influences of German Pietism.5 Some of the other influences that may have shaped the development of the ideals that manifested themselves in the establishment of the Bethel and Aurora colonies include millennialism and various mystic beliefs popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And one common element throughout these early utopian experiments that also was central to the establishment of Bethel and Aurora was that the place to undertake such experiments was in the new land of the United States. The...

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