another of the enduring aspects of the American experience—the ways in which a single individual may make a difference in the historical process. Several hands were involved in the making of Fairhope, but without Ernest B. Gaston it would not have existed. A young Iowa newspaper man and reformer, Gaston worked out the unique theories that became the colony plan. It was also he who organized the movement to recruit settlers and led them in November of 1894 to their promised land. The story of Fairhope’s origins is the story of both a man and his mission.
Fairhope will celebrate its centenary in 1994. No other American community established to demonstrate a secular reform philosophy has even approached this record of longevity.7 Fairhope’s claim to that achievement, however, must be qualified. A cooperative community advocating Henry George’s single-tax program to make land common property, the Fairhope colony was founded in 1894. It was called the Fairhope Industrial Association. Ten years later it changed its name to the Fairhope Single Tax Corporation. In 1908 the colony’s independent status was lost when the town of Fairhope was incorporated. The colony then became part of the town in a complicated arrangement that still puzzles strangers. Since 1908, when the municipality was created, there have been two Fairhopes; or, perhaps to put it better, the town of Fairhope has contained two major elements—the “colony” people, living on single-tax colony land and taking part in the demonstration of the Georgist principles, and the non-colony people, living on privately-owned land and having no formal relationship and no commitment to the single-tax colony.
Fairhope is today a charming city of nearly nine thousand persons, growing rapidly in a rapidly growing area of coastal Alabama. The Fairhope Single Tax Corporation owns about 30 percent of the land within the city limits (including the main business district) and some 2,300 acres of land in unincorporated parts of the county. Its declared purpose continues to be to demonstrate the virtues of George’s philosophy; with only minor alterations, the constitution the founders brought with them in 1894 remains in effect.
Over the last few decades the generally conventional values and policies of the municipality have come to dominate Fairhope. The community’s sense of identity is influenced in many ways by its utopian heritage, and most people who live there are proud of their city’s fame and unique history. But Fairhope as a town can no longer be defined by the utopian ideals of its pioneer settlers almost a century ago. This outcome was predicted by an area newspaper writer long ago. Reflecting in 1908 on the likely consequences of municipalization, he said, “Fairhope will be known hereafter as a town, and the name ‘colony’ will go out of use, except to describe certain local usages, such as ‘colony rents’ and ‘colony lands.’” 8But that prophecy badly misjudged the depth and tenacity of the colony idea. Fairhope’s fame, in fact, continued to spread after 1908 and for many years it was widely known as the home of the single-tax colony, a unique community distinguished by its radical ideas and institutions, as well as its creative and colorful personalities.
One Fairhoper wrote early in the century of the special bonds of community that attracted reformers to it and sustained it as a lively intellectual and cultural center. There was a “spirit of comradeship” there that she had not experienced elsewhere. It gave meaning to life and direction to one’s actions. Another early colonist rejected beautiful surroundings and material advantages as primary reasons for living in Fairhope. “Fairhope has an ideal,” he wrote; commitment to that ideal was the source of Fairhope’s real attraction.9 Born of the colonists’ quest for a humane, egalitarian society, the “spirit of comradeship” rooted in service to an ideal flourished long after the town was formed, reaching its apogee in the 1920s.
By that time evidence of the experiment’s success had many faces. The colony’s land policy attracted industrious settlers of modest means. Nowhere else could they acquire home, farm, and business sites without cost, being required only to pay into the common treasury an annual rental based on the land’s value. The natural beauty of the location was enhanced by cooperative development of the woodlands, ravines, and bay front—and was protected from private monopoly by a public policy that declared scarce resources to belong to all citizens. These policies nurtured a kind of democratic communalism. Few people were either rich or poor; hierarchy and pretension found unfertile soil; social intercourse was easy and informal; homes were simple but often innovative and appealing; architecture and town development reflected a society free of sharp class divisions.
The colony’s policies of free land, public improvements, community-owned utilities, and open park lands benefited colonists and non-colonists alike. Industrious working people of modest means formed the backbone of the town of Fairhope. But writers, actors, artists, and craftsmen also found the atmosphere congenial and initiated an enduring commitment to creative expression. A sprinkling of famous visitors—among them Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, Charless Ingersoll, Mrs. Henry Ford, Elizabeth Mead, Harold Ickes, Wharton Esherick, and Clarence Darrow—enriched the intellectual and cultural life of the community and fostered a cosmopolitan atmosphere. Not surprisingly, the community also had more than its share of mavericks, people who expressed strong opinions on how life ought to be lived, what was most healthful to eat, what forms of dress (or undress) were most natural, and how individuals ought to relate to one another and to their environment.
In 1907 a Minnesota school teacher named Marietta Johnson, drawn to Fairhope by its reformist philosophy, founded the School of Organic Education. She directed her school for three decades, became a leader of the national progressive education movement, and turned what she called the “Fairhope Idea in Education” into a modest national force. School and colony meshed to add dynamism and an expanded mission to the community. A follower of John Dewey, America’s leading philosopher of progressive education, Johnson argued that children reared on the competitive ethic of the American school system were unlikely to grow up to be the cooperative, reformminded, justice-oriented citizens Fairhope wished to produce. The single tax alone was not enough, she said; it needed an educational foundation. With enthusiastic colony support, her school worked to provide that foundation. Dewey himself came to visit in 1913 and liked what he saw: a demonstration of “how the ideal of equality of opportunity for all is to be transmuted into reality.” 10
Fairhopers believed that their model community, imperfect though it was, gave the nation an example to follow. But even at the height of its fame in the 1920s there were few signs of progress toward converting others and no program to accomplish that goal. The municipality itself made no effort to adopt the single-tax system and neighboring communities were similarly unmoved by the widespread recognition of Fairhope’s growth and popularity. The many favorable reports written about it inspired interest and admiration, but not emulation.
The Great Depression of the 1930s and the World War that followed were watershed years in Fairhope’s history. The depression years were a time of diminished funds, shrinking outside interest in both the colony and the school, and the passing of the old leadership. E. B. Gaston died in 1937, Marietta Johnson a year later. A new generation of leaders, many of them children of the pioneer families, kept the colony and the school functioning, but neither of these institutions would ever again be the dominant influence in the town it had once been.11 With the coming of the war, shipbuilding, an air force base, and other war-related activities in nearby Mobile drew thousands of workers to south Alabama, and Fairhope’s population nearly doubled. This demographic revolution, started by wartime conditions, continued in the post-war years, and increasing numbers of men and women employed in Mobile made their homes on the eastern shore. Few of the newcomers were Fairhopers, understanding or sharing the sense of purpose that had earlier defined the town.12
Fairhope ceased to be mentioned in discussions of radical or utopian movements and was no longer a magnet for people looking to solve social problems. Instead, it took on more
