This week Weird Things’ Matt Finley explores the failed utopian societies of history. Monday, he traipsed through the memories of the Oneida sex community. Enjoy!

Jumbo shrimp. Military intelligence. Anarchist organization. Classic oxymorons, right? And the founders of the now-defunct Ferrer Colony in Stelton, New York, don’t disagree. In fact, they repeatedly stressed that the colony was not an anarchist organization, but rather an organization of anarchists (a semantic parsing that seems, at best, a lateral move, but if it makes the anarchists happy…). This all took place back in the first half of the 20th century, when Ferrer Schools – self-proclaimed Libertarian learning institutions named for Spain’s famous educator and anarchist, Francesc Ferrer i Guardia – were becoming more popular among working class idealists who wanted to ensure their children were educated from a secular, liberal and socio-culturally conscious point of view.

Formed as an experimental offshoot of Manhattan’s Ferrer School, the Ferrer Colony was intended to take anarchist education to its logical extreme through the establishment of a year-round settlement for students and their likeminded families. Now, I don’t want suggest that the philosophical Poobahs of fringe ideological movements aren’t always the most pragmatic people, but the Stelton project lacked a certain degree of planning forethought. The land was unfit for farming. The bathing facilities were a nearby stream. Early pupils lived in makeshift tents and shacks, from which they watched the dormitory’s sluggish construction. The first winter (1915/1916) found the school staff and five resident families living in a freezing shantytown (though the farmhouse kitchen and nearly-completed dorm had limited heating) where the only bright spots were communal Saturday night dinners, which often ended in joyful, raucous all-night celebrations.

Finally, come spring, the dorm was finished and more families began arriving.

You’re wondering where the anarchy comes in, aren’t you? I mean, organizationally speaking, doesn’t this bear all the markings of idealized socialism? Or a ranch for raising free-range hippies?

You’re not wrong. Many of the school’s founders identified with (and even wandered the outskirts of) the socialist movement, especially in light of the then-raging Russian revolution. In fact, life at the Ferrer Settlement often found itself at the whim of various social fads, including a variety of dubious dietetic trends that Stilton defenders cite when recounting the colony’s stellar health record during the 1918 flu epidemic. Still, to play anarchists’ advocate, the colony’s few written organizational tenets were defined only as a matter of legality, and there were no membership requirements or visitation regulations. The community’s only stated purpose was to provide an inclusive institution to “lead a group of people back to a natural, mutually self-sufficient relationship with one another.”

The colony, which offered an increasing number of adult classes and opportunities for artistic – especially musical – performance, grew throughout the late teens and early 1920s. As one would expect from anarchists, most of the adult couples were unmarried, and the biggest ongoing ideological conflicts revolved around the use of violence in furthering the anarchist agenda (or would that be “the agenda of anarchists”?). Folks were marginally bummed that an increasing number of colonists were converting over to full-on socialism, but, generally, everything was copacetic. While most sources agree that the colony only truly achieved its humanist goals during its earliest days, when residents were forced to rely on each other for survival, the collapse of the Ferrer Colony wasn’t born out of internal struggles, but rather out of outside conflict and the dependable ravages of time. The last straw came during WWII, when the government erected numerous barracks on the land surrounding Stilton, and rowdy soldiers allegedly began vandalizing the school and assaulting residents. The aging colonists left and the community dissolved, proving that, as oxymorons go, the communal individualism of anarchy is no match for the organized chaos of war.

Friday: New Harmony… because old harmony went to the drunks