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By William Abbott
Llano del Rio is more than a failed colony on the edge of the Mojave Desert. It is a Raymond Chandler like tale of politics, labor and Harrison Gray Otis, patriarch of the Los Angeles Times. Attorney Job Harriman was active in the natural socialist movement at the end of the 1800’s. He served as Eugene Deb’s vice presidential running mate in 1900. Unsuccessful, he returned to lawyering in Los Angeles, and a decade later, ran for mayor of Los Angeles as a progressive/socialist. During this same time period, efforts to unionize the Los Angeles work force were bitterly opposed, and one of the most outspoken critics was Harrison Gray Otis, editor of the Los Angeles Times. In 1910, a bomb explodes behind the Times building killing twenty people. The McNamara Brothers and Ortie McManigal, labor organizers were arrested. While running for mayor (and having received the most votes in the primary), Harriman served as their defense counsel, although Clarence Darrow eventually appeared as co-counsel and took over the case due to Harriman’s need to campaign for office. Darrow eventually convinced his clients to plead guilty, and some pundits believe that the timing of the pleas, a few days before the mayoral election, was designed to ruin Harriman’s chances of being elected mayor which in fact was what transpired. Convinced that socialism would not succeed politically without the foundation of an economic model, Harriman turned to creating a socialist colony.
In 1913, Harriman and a handful of his acquaintances purchased land and water rights in an area roughly 20 miles east of Palmdale. With this investment, they created the Llano Del Rio Company. To become a member of Llano, members had to acquire 2000 shares of company stock. Harriman used the corporate concept in part as a shield from business critics. The community of Llano was designed by Alice Constance Austin, a socialist, feminist and self-trained architect. She developed a circular plan for the community, and among other innovations, included kitchenless homes and day care facilities. The colony was marketed to workers captured by the limitations of capitalism. The community officially (and appropriately) opened for public membership on May Day in 1914. One tactical error was the use of a stock agent who, in successfully selling the stock, likely oversold the advantages of living in Llano, which in turn lead to internal operating strife as the community grew too quickly with individuals not ideally suited to communal living. Within a few years, the colony soon had 1000 residents.
According to a report published by the Historical Society of Southern California in 1918, the colonists controlled directly or indirectly roughly 9000 acres of land with 2000 acres cultivated in alfalfa (400 acres), orchards (120 acres), gardens (120 acres), corn (100 acres) and the balance in various grains. The colony maintained active crews responsible for community buildings, homes, roads, irrigation works, dam construction, agricultural land preparation, animal husbandry. Reports indicated that Llano, within a relatively short time period, grew 90% of what it needed to support itself. While the colony considered selling agricultural products and modest handicrafts, its location was too remote to successfully implement the vision. The colony included a hotel, community hall, lime kilns, barns, silo, canning plant, lumber mill and steam laundry. (see map) Llano maintained one of the first and largest Montessori schools (over 100 students), and was highly organized in the theater, education and entertainment, including an orchestra.
Utopian in concept but not necessarily in practice, internal strife plagued the community as it learned to govern itself. Llano’s system of governance relied upon 60 different committees reporting to a government board, a system which did not always work smoothly. An equal challenge was that of a reliable water supply. The colonists were unable to secure a state permit to construct the amount of storage it needed to maintain a sufficient water supply. Like many colonies, a lack of capital always operated as a brake on what could be accomplished. With the outbreak of World War I, the colony lost part of its workforce to the Army and to new-found industries in Los Angeles. Undaunted, the colonists sought out a new location in California’s Central Valley, but eventually acquired an abandoned forest plantation and mill town of 20,000 acres and buildings in Stables, Louisiana. In 1918, a group chartered a train and moved east, and named the colony Newllano. This colony existed for many years and included two satellite communities (cattle raising in New Mexico and rice farming in Texas).
The early demise (1918) of Llano was a function of the “Too’s”; too remote, too rapid growth, too little capital and too little water. Unlike other California colonies however, its progeny continued for many years, with Newllano lasting until 1939.
For American Utopia Photo Archives visit http://www.lpb.org/programs/utopia/photos.html
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).
