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NPR is marking this year's 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States with stories from across the country that illustrate American life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Today's story is from rural Kansas. It could almost be the setup for a sitcom. A French aristocrat moves to the Midwest to start a silk-making commune, but it really happened more than 150 years ago. From Kansas Public Radio, Matthew Algeo has the story.
MATTHEW ALGEO, BYLINE: There's now a working ranch where Silkville used to be.
LOWELL ANDERSON: This - originally, it was the cocoonery.
ALGEO: Lowell Anderson and his wife, Theresa, have managed the ranch for more than 30 years. Lowell gave me a tour.
ANDERSON: We use it as a stables or horse barn.
ALGEO: So this is where they kept the cocoons. I guess the silkworms would spin the cocoons, and they would use the thread to make silk right in this building.
ANDERSON: Yes, yes. As I understand, they did a lot of work upstairs in this building.
ALGEO: Communes like Silkville were relatively common in 19th-century America. Timothy Miller is an emeritus professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas.
TIMOTHY MILLER: There were several popular movements. The one that has to do with Silkville was known as Fourierism.
ALGEO: Fourierism is based on the writings of the early French socialist Charles Fourier, who promoted communal living as the cure to poverty and disorder. Some of his beliefs were idiosyncratic. When society achieved perfection, he thought the oceans would turn into lemonade. But his more practical ideas were influential. Karl Marx was a fan. So was Ernest de Boissiere, the French aristocrat who founded Silkville in 1870.
MILLER: He took his very considerable fortune and came to the U.S. The U.S. was still the place of opportunity.
ALGEO: De Boissiere had another reason to come to America. His socialist views made him an enemy of the French Emperor Napoleon III. Eventually, he made his way to Kansas, along with about 50 fellow-minded French men and women. Then he planted hundreds of mulberry trees to feed the thousands of silkworms he imported from Asia. Why silk?
MILLER: Well, you know, you got a community, you've got to have an industry, right? So he was really taken with silk.
ALGEO: A few relics of Silkville survive, carefully preserved at the Franklin County Historical Society in nearby Ottawa, Kansas.
DIANA STARESINIC-DEANE: This is probably the most fragile thing that we own. Let's see if I can get this open.
ALGEO: Historical Society director Diana Staresinic-Deane opens one end of a cardboard tube and gingerly pulls out a bubble-wrapped artifact, a long thin piece of blown glass.
STARESINIC-DEANE: This is a glass bobbin that was used at Silkville, and I'm just...
ALGEO: The silk they made was high quality. It even won an award at Philadelphia's centennial exhibition. But life in Silkville wasn't all work. Like on other 19th-century communes, there were whispers that residents practiced free love. We don't know if they did, but we do know they had fun. Diana Staresinic-Deane reads from a letter written by a local man in 1913, remembering a party he'd attended at the commune almost four decades earlier.
STARESINIC-DEANE: (Reading) Wine was free. Everyone was urged to drink all they wanted. Children as well as grown people were asked to help themselves.
Oh, that's so interesting, considering by 1880, we're starting to pass prohibition laws (laughter).
ALGEO: With his long flowing white beard and dark piercing eyes, Silkville's founder, Ernest de Boissiere, cut a striking figure, but he was not a strict socialist. While most members of the commune lived together in a big house on the property, some were allowed to rent land from de Boissiere and build their own homes.
ANDERSON: Yeah, this wall fell down probably 15 years ago, and it just kind of pushed it on in, and...
ALGEO: Back at the ranch, Lowell Anderson shows me a crumbly stone house standing lonely in a field. There's not much left of it. The roof is caved in and just three walls are standing. At least the cattle like it. One corner of the house has been worn smooth by generations of black angus rubbing their heads against the stones. This was once the home of Claude and Benoite Clair, a couple from France who came to Silkville around 1870. Janelle Richardson is their great-great granddaughter.
JANELLE RICHARDSON: Yes, they came to America. And as far as I know, they came direct. I have some evidence that would suggest that.
ALGEO: Why did they go to Silkville?
RICHARDSON: Who knows? I think they must have known something about the possibility of a commune.
ALGEO: Do you know if either Claude or Benoite were socialists? I mean, were they believers in the cause?
RICHARDSON: It would suggest that they might have been.
ALGEO: But Silkville had trouble keeping members. Many were lured away from the commune by lucrative opportunities in the rapidly developing West. One of Claude and Benoite's daughters was sent to work in Dodge City, where she fell in love with a German immigrant. They married and went on to have nine children.
RICHARDSON: One of the sons was very successful, had a pool hall and auto dealer, and the other was a farmer and auctioneer, and their grandchildren became lawyers and all kinds of things.
ALGEO: What ultimately killed the Silkville commune, however, wasn't losing members. It was losing money. Capitalism could not be defeated. Socialism on the prairie failed. That beautiful silk they made - it was just too expensive, says Professor Timothy Miller.
MILLER: They did pretty well in some ways, but they could not make it cost-effective to compete with China, basically.
ALGEO: That's because there were no tariffs on cheap imported silk. By the early 1880s, Silkville was abandoned. Ernest de Boissiere returned to France. Most of the other members of the commune scattered across the United States, weaving themselves into the fabric of the nation. The original commune house burned down in 1916. A smaller house was built using the ruins. That's where Lowell and Theresa Anderson live today. Lowell doesn't believe in ghosts, but he's heard the stories.
ANDERSON: The wildest one I heard was some people went upstairs and came down and someone - the ghost had set the table, that the dining room table was all set with silverware and plates and glasses and things.
ALGEO: So at least they're helpful ghosts.
ANDERSON: They are. They're - yeah, friendly.
ALGEO: A few of the mulberry trees planted by the commune more than 150 years ago still stand, survivors of blizzards and tornadoes, droughts and floods, their roots now deep in the Kansas soil. For NPR News, I'm Matthew Algeo, reporting from what used to be Silkville, Kansas. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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