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Federal intervention in community development is nothing new. During the 1930’s, the federal Resettlement Administration (“RA”) actively assisted rural families to relocate to communities planned by the federal government. The resettlement administration existed from April 1935 to December 1936, and in 1937, in response to public criticism and implementation challenges, the program was folded into the Farm Security Administration. Along with the community planning, the Administration was active in agricultural cooperative lending, farm loans, building migrant farm camps, the Photography Project, famous for its photographs by Dorothea Lange, film documentaries, and recordings of folk music.
The RA concentrated on three categories of settlements: part-time farmers near industrial centers, all-rural colonies for farmers, and villages with decentralized industry. The federal government formed the Federal Subsistence Homesteads Corporation as a non-profit entity for the purpose of buying, developing and leasing the property. Local corporations were used as well. With over 200 communities nationwide, the Administration developed two subsistence settlements in California: El Monte (100 units) and Reseda (40 units) (in some publications referred to as the San Fernando Homesteads). Unlike the exclusive agricultural State of California colonies of Durham and Delhi, these subsistence colonies were designed to support personal farming as a supplement to nearby industrial employment. Elwood Mead, a key strategist in California’s doomed earlier program and who had also been active in the South developing agricultural colonies, also served as a federal advisor for the national program, perhaps serving to modify the program to work in conjunction with industrial employment. The plots were small (one acre) and were designed to provide housing a modest income support through part-time farming. The El Monte project also included a sewer treatment plant. Little has been written of the Reseda settlement, although reportedly Dorothea Lange took photographs in both communities.
The Resettlement Administration was hampered by the fundamental fact that subsistence colonies in the past had largely failed, and a successful operating model did not exist. The federal program was politically controversial, and predictably short-lived. Efforts include east coast colonies focused on Jewish garment workers (Jersey Settlement, later called Roosevelt,) as well as Afro-American centric communities (Aberdeen Gardens, near Newport News, Virginia). Charges were leveled that the RA program had communistic leanings. Many of the sites failed due to poor agricultural capability or lack of meaningful employment opportunities for those developed as re-employment centers. The two California settlements fared better than most for a couple of key reasons. First, they were geographically located near meaningful employment opportunities. Second, they were planned and supported by local business interests and local planning interests, and not master planned and administered by the RA. As the national economy labors through another recession, will the federal government do any better this time around? Want to read more, try “Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program” available at http://www.archive.org/details/tomorrownewworld00conkrich.
By William W. Abbott
We all are familiar with the State of California in its role in land planning and development as the uber regulator. But if you turn back the hands of time immediately before World War I, a different picture emerges; that of land developer.
The triggering event was the Wheatland Hop Riot in 1913. The Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”) made an early attempt to organize the field laborers. The resulting conflict between growers and laborers resulted in four deaths, with the State of California sending the National Guard to bring law and order to the fields. It was California’s first documented farm labor conflict. The Wheatland Hop Riot, coupled with a national progressive movement to improve the quality of life for farmers, lead to the California State Commission on Colonization and Rural Credits. Concerned with escalating land prices, land speculation and the growing economic gap between tenant farmers and landowners, the Commission’s charge was to craft a strategy to improve rural life.
To implement this vision, the legislature of 1917 passed the Land Settlement Act and created the Land Settlement Board. The Board’s first endeavor involved the acquisition of 6,219 acres in Butte County near the existing community of Durham, and the development of an agricultural colony. Durham was the brainchild of Elwood Mead. An irrigation expert and a leader in Wyoming water rights law, Mead also developed agricultural colonies in Australia. Later, as an instructor at U.C. Berkley, and relying on his Australia experience, he was hired to develop and organize the Durham settlement.
The State, using a multi-disciplinary approach involving numerous agencies, adopted a role which was more than that of just a subdivider. The Settlement Board brought together supporting disciplines such as public health and agricultural practices to increase the likelihood of success. The State acquired land water rights, graded and planted crops, and built homes. The land was subdivided into various sized parcels based upon agricultural productivity, and through lease-purchase agreements, a community was born. The State actively directed life in Durham, from building homes to supervising agricultural practices. In other words, it was Big Brother meets Farmer John.
The Durham settlement was perceived as a success, and the legislature, in response to the end of the war, redirected the Land Settlement Act towards veterans and launched a second community in Delhi, Merced County. Delhi consisted of an 8,000 acre tract, essentially uncultivated land, and like Durham, had no supporting infrastructure. The town was laid out by a landscape architect from the University of California. Unabashedly, a writer for the Sacramento Bee declared: “In years to come, this town of Delhi, now little but surveyors’ lines and grade stakes, with a new home under way here and there, should attain the fame of Gary, Indiana, that specialty-built city of the Steel Corporation.” In hindsight, the Sacramento Bee was guilty of mild exuberance.
Want more information? Follow the links to period pieces, including Progress Under the Land Settlement Act, 1919, (and corresponding appendix) and How California Helps Men Own Farms and Rural Homes, 1920, as well as maps and photographs. Our next installment will examine Durham and Delhi in greater detail.
By William W. Abbott
California’s historic settlement patterns are far more diverse than what would first appear to be the case. In addition to the religious (San Bernardino, Compton, Whittier ), the ethnic (Solvang, Ft. Ross) and the timber company towns (Samoa, Westwood, McCloud), there are numerous spiritual, philosophical, labor and socialist undertakings in this state’s history. This article is an overview of the labor/socialist origins of the Kaweah Colony, located in eastern Tulare County.
The period following the Civil War was a time, both nationally and internationally, in which there was rising dissatisfaction with capitalism as preferred of national economic model. An American socialist, Laurence Grodlund, wrote of Gwerman socialism in Co-operative Commonwealth, a publication which circulated in the United States. Labor activists in the San Francisco Bay Area became interested in Grodlund’s description of a better way. Influenced by Grodlund and other prominent writers, a group of Bay Area residents, lead by the labor activists, organized the Kaweah Co-Operative Commonwealth (the Kaweah Colony). Its purpose was to patent the newly opened timbered resources of eastern Tulare County and use the timber as the basis for a new society. Eastern Tulare was largely inaccessible and thus of little interest to commercial timber interests. The participants applied for 53 patents covering 12,000 acres of land surrounding the forks of the Kaweah River. The Land Patent Office, suspicious of recent fraudulent patent activity in Humboldt County, was slow to process the claims. Assuming success, and perhaps encouraged by the land agents to move forward, the Kaweah Commonwealth was launched without the patents. Funds were not only raised by the participants as part of a buy-in, but also from national and European sources as well. Many of the members never lived at Kaweah, but active clubs supporting Kaweah existed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, and New York. The colony was begun, and its principal undertaking, starting in 1886, was the construction of an 18 mile road over a four-year period to access the standing timber resources. The plan was that the logs were to be cut, milled, and then hauled to market. In terms of daily life, the colony has its own medium of exchange, wherein all participants were paid, based upon the time devoted to Colony undertakings. The time credits could be exchanged for meals and goods at the Colony store. Recognizing that all labor was valuable, all work was credited at the same exchange rate.
The Colony began at Arcady, up from Three Rivers. As most labor and resources were devoted to the road construction, few other prominent improvements were developed other than improvised road construction camps. The Colony received a death-blow, when, at the same time that the road was completed in 1890, Congress created Sequoia National Park, with the surrounding lands dedicated to national forest. As the Land Office had never taken final action on the colonists land patents, their work was for naught. Their land claims were rejected and they were now trespassers, charged with stealing timber resources from the federal lands.
By 1890, colony constructed buildings in Kaweah, including a hall for dining and meetings, a blacksmith shop, a print shop, a barn and a blacksmith shop. The post office still stands (although in a different location), and the colonist’s road was used by the Park Service for many years as the only road to the sequoia groves. Among other accomplishments, the colonists published a newspaper, the Kaweah Commonwealth (still published today.)
By 1892, most of the Colony had disbanded. Its peak population is estimated at about 300 individuals, and membership peaked at 500.
For further reading, I recommend California’s Utopian Colonies (Yale Western Americana Paperbound, 1953 by Robert Hine) and Co-Operative Dreams: A History of the Kaweah Colony (Raven River Press, 1999 by Jay O’Connell).
