is it more apparent than in the continuing demonstration of the founders’ determination that scarce community resources should never be privately owned or developed for private gain. As the coastal areas along Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico have fallen under the relentless assault of land speculators and developers, Fairhope stands more strikingly than ever before as an oasis, a tiny spot preserved from surrounding offenses and barriers to the people. Its celebrated park lands along the bluffs and the beaches below give vistas that cannot be closed—all because of the founding philosophy that land should be common property.
Ironically, Fairhope’s very success in attracting a steadily increasing flow of new inhabitants now threatens its future. There is no more unoccupied colony land to take up, and the demand for deeded land puts it out of the price range of persons of modest means who once would have found their futures on free colony land. Whether Fairhope can withstand these demographic pressures into the next century is an open question. They seem almost certain to intensify rather than ameliorate class divisions and to subvert rather than nurture bonds of community. This may therefore be a good time to inquire into Fairhope’s origins—to ask why and how it was created, and to consider afresh the solutions its founders offered to the universal and enduring problems of human community.
A DOZEN IOWA REFORMERS ANSWERED ERNEST B. Gaston’s call to come to his Des Moines office on January 4, 1894, to hear a paper he had written and to listen to a proposal he wished to make. It was the winter of a great depression and reports of human suffering and economic calamity came from all parts of the nation. Gaston’s twelve friends, well known to each other and to their young host, were seasoned critics of their country, Jeremiahs gifted at condemning the plundering spirit of the age in which they lived. They surely nodded in agreement that day when Gaston spoke of the “enormous waste of human energy and natural resources” and the “hideous injustice and cruelty” which he saw woven more tightly each day into the fabric of American life. Opportunities for honest men were vanishing, he told them, “as one industry after another goes into the hands of trusts and the broad acres of our common heritage pass under the control of speculators.” In the fiercely individualistic, competitive world that America was becoming, he believed, material success was possible only for those who would sacrifice their sense of justice and anesthetize their concern for their fellow human beings.16
Gaston and his friends were political warriors in a common crusade. For three years they had been hopeful workers in the cause of the new Populist Party—grandly called “The People’s Party”—drawn to it out of many reform activities and organizations in which they had trained. Their gathering place, where they met regularly to talk over ideas and strategies, was the office of the Farmer’s Tribune, a long-time journal of dissent and now the voice of Iowa Populism. Their animated conversations around the stove became angry broadsides in their newspaper. “Thousands of people are starving and freezing,” it announced just a few weeks after Gaston’s meeting with his comrades. One outrage after another was recorded: “soup houses and police hall corridors . . . are everywhere thronged by thousands of the victims of the most damnable financial policy that ever disgraced a civilized nation,” all in a country “filled with grain, fruit and all of labor’s products,” yet where “the laborers go into paupers’ and felons’ graves.” 17 Presiding over many of these conversations was General James B. Weaver, the paper’s editor and the Party’s 1892 presidential candidate. Gaston joined the editorial staff in 1891; the next year, as managing editor, he freed Weaver to travel the country campaigning for the presidency.
The deepening depression and spreading misery were not the only sources of the despair felt by the once optimistic reformers. Inspired by the vision and caught up in the enthusiasm of the Populist revolt they were saddened by the country’s rejection of the humane alternative they believed they had offered it. The Populist Party campaign of 1892 produced memorable rhetoric and enduring inspiration, but the electoral impact was slight. In Iowa, where Weaver won less than 5 percent of the vote, the outcome was especially discouraging. After the 1893 state and local elections, which likewise provided no encouragement, Gaston decided he had had enough of electoral politics. He reached the “disagreeable conclusion,” as he was to put it later, “that the road to the achievement of the reforms necessary to establish justice in the country at large, was a long and tedious one, the end of which might not be reached in time to do him individually any good.” Some other way must be found; some other outlet for reformist vision and energy must be hit upon.18
It was at this point that Gaston called on his twelve friends to listen to him read the paper he had been struggling to perfect for the past several months. He entitled it “True Co-operative Individualism,” and at its conclusion he asked his comrades to “consider plans for the organization of a cooperative Colony or Community.” His question for them was a challenging one: would they join him in building, somewhere on American virgin land, an alternative society in which they might plant and nurture the ingredients of a model social order? By creating their own community, he argued, they could offer to the country a visible example of a better way of life and perhaps in this way find the base and the leverage for reform that the political process seemed to deny them. At the same time they could provide almost immediately a satisfying environment for themselves, free from the corrupting moral and material imperatives of the larger society.
The young crusader was apparently persuasive. Acting as secretary of the meeting he had called, Gaston recorded, in the minute book in which he wrote for the first time that day, that the group voted “to prepare a draft constitution and bye laws and articles of incorporation and suggest plans for putting the ideas into practical operation at once.” 19
The man who inspired such enthusiasm among his friends had just passed his thirty-second birthday. Born in Henderson, Knox County, Illinois, on November 21,1861, Ernest Berry Gaston probably thought little about his lineage, but enterprising genealogists can trace it back at least to a rebellious noble ancestor named Jean Gaston de Foix, a French Huguenot born in 1600. Presumably guaranteed religious toleration by the Edict of Nantes, French Protestants like Jean Gaston found the reality sadly different. Long before Louis XIV formally revoked the edict in 1685, perhaps in the 1640s, Jean appears to have been banished and to have fled to Scotland in search of a more congenial religious climate. His sons, discomfited in turn by religious discrimination in Scotland, migrated in the 1660s to County Antrim, Ireland. From Ireland a number of Gastons eventually made their way to the American colonies, some to South Carolina, some to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and some to New England. One of these was a Hugh Gaston, born in Ireland in 1687. He sailed for the colonies early in the eighteenth century and his son, William, was the first of Hugh’s American-born sons. William’s son, John, helped to win independence for the colonies, serving as a major in the Northampton County militia of Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Gastons were a prolific clan. John and his wife Charity Cheeseman had eight children. One of those, James, married Mary Estep and they had nine children, the eighth of whom was E. B. Gaston’s father, James Estep Gaston, born in 1809.20
James Estep Gaston, father of E.B. Gaston.
By the time he married Sarah Kirk in 1838, James Estep Gaston had left the Baptist Church of his youth to follow Alexander Campbell into the newly revived Church of Christ where he became a zealous minister. Tutored by the famous Campbell and later joining him on tours through the midwest he was described by his mentor as “one of our best preachers,” a man “distinguished for good sense, good talent and unfeigned piety.” He had virtually no formal schooling, but he was admired as a student of Latin and Greek