(This article is the fourth in a 5-part series about experimental utopias.)

The trouble with Glennis, reasoned three residents of the late 19th century commune, was that it was just too rigid — the rules too numerous, the process of interpreting them too contentious. So the trio, who were among the the last remaining residents of the settlement, got into a hand-built boat in Washington’s Puget Sound, and rowed away.

The year was 1896. With twenty dollars between them, they bought a plot of land on Joe’s Bay and established there an anarchist colony, free of rules.

They called it Home.

The town of Home, Washington, circa 1890s.

The three men built houses for their families, and then wrote up a charter for the community. Each member would be afforded “the personal liberty to follow their own line of action no matter how it may differ from the custom of the past or present, without censure or ostracism from their neighbor.” They established a joint landholding organization and published an ad in the socialist magazine Coming Nation. The colony attracted radicals from San Francisco, New Orleans, and West Virginia. Several came from Portland, Oregon, where they had been operating an anarchist newspaper called Firebrand, and had been imprisoned for printing and mailing an obscene poem by Walt Whitman.

Home was soon was a haven for radicals. It began printing its own newspaper, the befittingly named Discontent. When Emma Goldman, an anarchist who’d gained notoriety from distributing feminist literature (and being jailed for it), visited Home, she befriended the colonists, who considered her a “jolly comrade” with “a heart so large that it embraces the whole world.” (The U.S. government, meanwhile, considered her a subversive menace.) Goldman developed a close relationship with Home resident Gertie Vose, a devout anarchist who had contributed to Firebrand and now wrote for Discontent.

Home was a quiet community of orchards and chicken coops, but nevertheless became the target of anti-anarchist hysteria that enveloped the nation. In August of 1901, a newspaper in nearby Tacoma warned readers of the allegedly seditious activities taking place there. The next month, President McKinley was assassinated by a self-proclaimed anarchist in Buffalo, New York, setting off a tidal wave of anti-anarchist sentiment, and arrests. Among them were Emma Goldman and a man named Jay Fox, who had witnessed Chicago’s Haymarket Massacre, in which several anarchists were executed, when he was a boy.

The Tacoma paper called for anarchists to be “exterminated” and “eliminated,” and set its sights on nearby Home. “Is this nest of vipers, this unclean den of infamy, to remain undisturbed?” the paper asked. “Pierce County must drive them away.”

Veterans of the Civil War who’d fought for the Union gathered in Tacoma and held a rally denouncing Home, promising to defeat the so-called rebels in their midst. Calling themselves the Loyal League of North America, they promised “to accomplish the utter annihilation of anarchists” in America. Home colonists condemned the assassination of McKinley and invited the Loyal League to come observe their nonviolent way of life, but the league refused to visit until the red flag was lowered and replaced with the stars and stripes.

Eventually the anti-anarchist frenzy subsided, but Home had been weakened by constant scrutiny from neighbors and law enforcement. In his book Utopias on Puget Sound, Charles Pierce LaWarne writes, “Most residents disclaimed the stereotype of the violent anarchist who fomented strikes, threw bombs or plotted assassinations. They opposed physical force and violence, and maintained a peaceful community… Government authorities who came to Home, including those with arrest warrants, were greeted peacably.” Still, the occasional violent anarchists would pass through, and police would take the opportunity to shake everyone down.

In 1910, anarchists bombed the Los Angeles Times building, killing twenty-one people. Two men suspected of transporting dynamite — David Caplan and Matthew Schmidt — had ties to Home. Colonists refused to speak to law enforcement on the matter, save for one: the police got Gertie Vose’s son Donald to cave, which led to the arrest and conviction of the two men. Emma Goldman was appalled at the betrayal, writing, “You will roam the Earth accursed, shunned and hated; a burden unto yourself, with the shadow of M.A. Schmidt and David Caplan ever at your heels unto the last.” It was the end of her relationship to the colony.

Donald’s rat-finking sowed division at Home. But it was nothing compared to the next conflict: the nudes versus the prudes.