Posted by amy at March 12th, 2007

My first draft suffered from a historical gap between Shays rebellion in 1787 and the arrival of early 20th century intellectuals Jimmy and Blanche Cooney. Not wanting that gap to appear too large, I filled in with a brief time line of the founding of the major colleges in the region, first Amherst, then Mt. Holyoke, UMass and then Smith, and I situated them in response to many of the pressures the community was facing as it transitioned from an agrarian to a capitalist economy.

I knew I was missing a piece in there somewhere and found out just what that was when Steve, one of my publishers at Collective Copies in Amherst handed me “The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northamption Association” just moments before my first book reading for Daniel Shays’ Legacy. Today, I took a stab at filling in that gap.

Historian Christopher Clark, returned to the region in his follow up to “The Roots of Rural Capitalism” with “The Communitarian Moment, The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association.” The moment Clark describes is the period between 1820 and 1850 when “ideas about society, culture, and religion were being tested and reshaped.” The Northampton Association of Education and Industry was just one of many communities started at the time, however because it lacked strong ties to literary icons like Bronson Alcott (Fruitlands) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (Brook Farm), combined with the loss of its archival material for over 100 years, it remained one of the lesser known social experiments.

Like earlier settlers to the region, most of the founders moved from Connecticut where they had been farmers or burgeoning industrialists. In the 1820s and 30s industrialization began to take hold in Connecticut and Western Massachusetts, and abolitionist investors began looking at silk as a possible solution to America’s growing dependency cotton. Like many early stage economic frenzies, the region saw land speculation based on planting mulberry trees, cocoon processing and textile factories. The bubble burst as part of the larger financial panic of 1837. The Northampton-Amherst manufacturing and textile industries were hit hard, and one of the businesses to go bankrupt was the Northampton Silk Works.

What started out by two investors as a desire to simply acquire the mill, grew to the establishment of a community by 11 founding members. All were abolition minded family men looking first and foremost to create economically stable communities. “Interest in setting up communities reflected, not a flight from one sphere to another, but the hope of establishing a better society capable of providing stable livelihoods.” Their hope of building a moral economy “around a silk company did not result simply from chance or opportunism. Silk production embodied the vision that farming and manufacturing in balance with each other could provide for a healthy, successful form of society.”

At its peak, there were 120 members living and working within the Northampton Association, and 240 over the course of the association’s life. Their internal struggles between communalism and individualism were not unlike the struggles at Fruitlands, BrookFarm or Modern Times (founded in 1851 on Long Island) and membership fluctuated over the four and a half year period during which the association existed. What ultimately undid the association was its failure to support itself and pay off it’s mounting debt.

While many historians viewed this another failed communitarian experiment, Clark repeatedly rejects the characterization of failure and points to larger societal changes and in the words of one of its members, “blot out of the human vocabulary the terms, with the ideas they express, of rich and poor, slave and master, hireling and employer, high and low, first class and second class, etc.”

Possibly the highest praise the Association earned was from Sojourner Truth who wrote that she came to trust the Association as a place “where all was characterized by an equality of feeling, a liberty of thought and speech and a largeness of soul, she could not have before met with, to the same extent, in any of her wanderings.”