Communal Studies

In 2009, I wrote an article about intentional communities in Alabama in Tributaries: The Journal of Alabama Folklife Association.

In 2010, I visited Arkansas the first week of August. I was in the Ozarks conducting some oral histories with folks that were involved in the communal movement in Arkansas in the 1960s-1970s. At the end of the year, I was interviewed by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette about my teenage years (see picture below) when I lived in an intentional community.

Besides the project I mentioned above, I am working on an article about a socialist village that existed in the Biloxi area from 1893 to 1898 called the Grander Age Colony. This story definitely weakens the notion of unanimity of belief and lifestyles in the South and Mississippi in the 19th century.

HELP!

I am aware that there was an intentional community or IC’s (AKA commune) in Jackson in the mid-70s called Celebration of Life. I also know of the Christian communalistic intentional community that lasted 10 years in West Jackson called Antioch in the 80s. If you know about these groups or others I would like to talk to you and get more information. I am trying to get an article out that continues my study of communal life in the South. Previously, I wrote an article about intentional communities in Alabama.

Other MS IC’s I have some info about but could use more:

• Davis Bend during Civil War period–interesting!!! Jeff Davis’s older brother experimented with utopian ideas of Robert Owen at Davis Bend. I think this led to Mount Bayou.
• Grander Age Colony (Co-opolis, Handsboro (currently Biloxi)) 1893-1898
• Delta and Providence Farms
• Wall Hill, MS Single-Tax colony around the 1930s (kind of like Fairhope in Alabama I guess)
• Freedom City in Greenville, MS
• Poor People’s Cooperative or Liberty House in late 1960s. Liberty House received goods from cooperatives in Aberdeen, Canton, Hattiesburg, Louisville, Marks, McComb, Mount Olive, Praire, Rolling Fork, Ruleville, Shelby, and West Point. Each cooperative had a niche, for instance, McComb did leatherworks, West Point made candles. These goods then went to Liberty House in Jackson, which sold the goods and part of the money went back to the cooperatives. Liberty House also had a store in Greenwich Village that from what I understand, Abbie Hoffman clerked at for a time.
• The Unitarian Universalist Church in 1975 had informal discussions about creating an IC
• Camp Sister Spirit on the Gulf Coast

Some forming ICs– Asatru Kindred in Lucedale is/was a group devoted to Norse ancestry and wilderness survival. There is also Govinda Gardens/New Talavana in Carriere a Khrishna community.