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Brave New World

(1886-1900)

 

 

At the turn of the century, white settlers on the Pacific Northwest Coast embarked on a series of communitarian experiments. The first, the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony, inspired a radical trend. The utopian experiment in Port Angeles promised a culturally rich atmosphere, founded on equality, where workers would receive their due. Though white workers were treated with respect and women were allowed to fully participate, people of color—African Americans, Asians, and Natives—were kept out.

Peter Peyto Good, a Harvard graduate who had visited a worker’s collective in Guise, France, introduced the concept. He arrived in Seattle to discuss the notion with a family relation Laura Hall. In the fall of 1886, at a series of events sponsored by the Knights of Labor, Good began to agitate against the Chinese miners and railway workers in order to whip up support for an all-white workers utopia. In November of that year he was arrested, charged with conspiracy against the federal government, and imprisoned for ten days. The following winter, perhaps as a result of the ill effects of his time in jail, he died suddenly.

But his grand scheme did not. Seattle city attorney George Venable Smith, enthralled by Good’s maps and models of an ideal community for working men and their families, became the new spokesman for the cause. Laura Hall became editor of a newspaper created to articulate the goals of the worker-owned collective and to fend off attacks by those who considered the members dangerous radicals.

The Puget Sound Cooperative Colony (PSCC) selected a site in Port Angeles, a fertile river valley with a deep harbor protected by a curved sandbar called Ediz Hook. Decades before, Port Angeles’ founder, entrepreneur Victor Smith, convinced the territorial government to remove the customs from the older and more established township of Port Townsend to this pre-platted city. In 1865 Smith drowned in a shipwreck, and the Custom’s House returned to Port Townsend. Without him, Victor Smith’s dream of a thriving farming, whaling, and logging town perished.

Three decades later, PSCC introduced five hundred new citizens from as far east as Ohio and Chicago to this remote outpost on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Right off they built essential industries that would support their new lives on the edge of the wilderness: a sawmill, a brick factory, and a dairy. Later, the colony added a store and a hotel, a lecture hall and a library, and even an opera house.

Already, the first wave of white settlers had removed a nearby S’Klallam village from the teeming shore to the far side of Ennis Creek. When this second wave arrived, the Natives provided fish, game, and other supplies. The utopian theorists blithely accepted these supplies while trespassing on the property of the local S’Klallam, without extending to them what they claimed were the basic rights of all workers.

The original aim of the colony: to provide working men and their families with a secure future through the efficiency of their co-owned industries; however, profitable land speculation by PSCC, which began as a means to end, compete with the Cooperative’s more lofty goals. Everyday practical problems caused the leadership to overturn their principles, which led to the charge of hypocrisy, and riled up the community. For example, though the colony was supposed to be controlled by the workers, originally all eleven board members were well-educated social theorists. Eventually, men of more practical accomplishment replaced the board. Despite these changes, however, the experiment broke apart. In November of 1900, the last assets were sold at auction.

Nevertheless, in the decade and a half that the utopia lasted, the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony had a lasting impact on the culture of the region. Early on, the community established equal rights for women, for example, on the PSCC board. Minerva E. Troy, the daughter of the colony physician, became one of the first women to make a run for the U.S. House of Representatives. Respect for women, independent thinking by laboring men, as well as commitment to the arts, continue to define Port Angeles today. Collaborative projects, for example the steamship Angeles and the West End Opera House, instilled a can-do attitude that is the legacy of the PSCC.

In 1889, as the newest state in the union peered ahead to the turn-of-the-century, PSCC became the model for other social experiments in Washington. For example, the Equality Colony in Skagit County aimed to provide a working model of shared wealth that would eventually convert the entire nation to socialism. Though most did not linger long, utopian experiments such as the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony encouraged newcomers to think big when they imagined the region’s future. Another word for this: Hope.