(paper) Communal Springwater, an 1850's Brook Farm
Doug Hamilton
“In addition to their religious orientation, and as part of their common New England background, the residents of Springwater shared a common New England intellectual heritage, Edgar Odson wrote for Bailey's 1913 history of the county:
“Plain living (enforced) and high thinking was the order of the day at the settlement. The years immediately preceding had been a time of political unrest in the Old World and intellectual ferment in the New, finding outlet in rebellions, Fourierism and transcendentalism. Springwater did not escape the contagion, and so the younger set at once organized a literary society which met at stated intervals to read papers and discuss weighty matters. The Society also published a paper -in longhand- which probably was the first publication issued in the county, the Atheneum Banner” (Odsen 248)” ...
From 1849 until his death in 1880, George Ripley worked as a book reviewer for Horace Greeley on the New York Tribune. Odson says thata at Springwater the Tribune “was everybody's friend, philosopher, and guide in worldly matters.” (Odson 250) Readers of the paper during the Yankee decades at Springwater may have been familiar with Ripley's view (as readers of the 1840's would have known of the paper's advocay of Fourierism).
Ripley said that the aim of Brook Farm, formed in 1841, was “to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life, than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions.” ...
Odson's account makes Springwater sound similar in spirit and enterprise to Brook Farm: a place where an imposed order for everyday life created a sense of community which allowed for a second order of intellectual improvement. In this case the first order was the Quaker regimen of plain living instead of socialist egaliltarianism. Odson reports that on Sunday afternoons and evening a Sunday school, reading circle, and circulating library operated for a number of years -all favoring books and topics of a religious nature. If this was held at the meeting house, which was built in the spring of 1858, it would place Springwater somewhat ahead of Decorah, where a correspondent lamented in January of 1858 about the towns inability to sustain a lyceum, and ahead of Hesper where the Philomath's circulating library was not established until the 1860's.
Excerpts from David Faldet's paper, High-Minded Yankees: Transcendentalism and Winneshiek County's First Decade, published in a collection of edited works, Utopian Visions of Work and Community, University of Iowa 1996
Doug Hamilton
In the matter of high community standards, the most notable Yankee settlement in Winneshiek County was Springwater, which grew up between the years of 1852 and 1860, but which had all but disintegrated as a Yankee settlement by 1870. Its chief founder Ansel Rogers owned a mill which was the center of its business activity. Equally important, Rogers was also an approved minister in the Society of Friends. And it was a Friends community that formed there. In the 1850’s and 1860’s, Springwater was an exceptional community knit together by strong bonds of Yankee culture that included interest in transcendentalism, and an active culture political culture that focued in particular around the issue of abolition and, to a lesser degree, around the issue of temperance. More than any other Yankee settlement in the county, Springwater qualifies as strongly comunity-centered in its makeup. As resident Edgar Odson would later write, “It was a pretty good community and died young” (Odson 250)
Doug Hamilton
This link here below is a good addition as context to this material on the Quaker settlement as a communal group coming from New England to the Decorah area in Winneshiek County, Iowa:
“Throughout Europe and especially in Germany during the latter part of the Eighteenth Century new ideas and new approaches to the problem of man’s relation to the universe were being discovered. These were carried over into England to become a part of the Romantic Movement in literature. Yet somehow they failed to reach America. Again it was probably the necessity for dealing with the here and now which pre-
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vented Americans from giving their own interpretation to these new ideas. Then “suddenly — so at least it seemed — ... the new ideas and ideals found their way” [10] to the young New England generation of the early eighteen thirties.
https://leavesofgrass.org/gelatt1.htm