No Place – Candy Hatcher

NO PLACE LIKE HOME;

IT HAD A CAREFREE SPIRIT THAT MADE THE COMMUNITY A HOME FOR CRUSADERS AND MISFITS AND EVEN DREW NATIONAL HEADLINES FOR NUDITY

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER December 18, 2000

CANDY HATCHER

What Dorothy said about this place used to be true.

There was no place like it.

Home, a 240-acre community southwest of Gig Harbor, has a history unlike any other. For more than 20 years, it was known nationally as a Utopia.

The colony drew communists and socialists, anarchists and women who campaigned for emancipation. It attracted people who advocated free love and others who just wanted to be left alone. One native recalled it as simply a safe, nurturing place to grow up.

Every house was full of books. Children were encouraged to read, ask questions and explore. “People talked all the time, and they talked about important things. Philosophy, socialism and every other kind of ism. No subject was taboo,” Eleen Greco, now 80, recalled.

But the live-and-let-live spirit that made this spot so inviting to crusaders and misfits a century ago, that drew scorn from Congress and gave the Supreme Court pause, is history.

Sure, it still has all the charm you expect of a place called Home: historic houses in the hills and along the waterfront; cedar-shaded roads; businesses such as Lulu’s Home Port, where the waitress knows what you want to eat, even if you don’t.

People still respect each other’s privacy. It’s still a nice place to raise a family. But 81 years after a judge ordered the colony dissolved, few of the old ideals remain.

Government seems ever present, requiring topographical surveys and inspections and all kinds of permits. Bridges bring stop-and-go traffic to the peninsula. Beaches that used to be everybody’s aren’t for just anybody anymore.

Through the years, “so many people have responded to the sound of Home,” Greco said. “It’s been nirvana for all kinds of people.” But Home’s story, she said, is the “birth and death of a unique civilization.”Haven for anarchists Three families looking for peace and tolerance arrived on the shores of Joe’s Bay in Pierce County in 1896. They bought land from the bay to the top of the hill, set up the Mutual Home Colony Association and vowed to keep government far from their lives.

The rules of the growing colony were simple. The association held title to all the land and operated the village meeting place and the trading post. Residents joined the association and put their homes on community land. Each family was allowed to use up to two of the town’s 217 acres. They could do what they wanted, believe what they wanted, as long as they lived peacefully and didn’t hurt anyone.

They didn’t drink; they didn’t smoke; they didn’t gamble or go to church. The only businesses were cooperatives where, instead of money, members traded goods from their small gardens and farms.

In 1899, Home had 54 residents living quietly and unobtrusively. By 1905, the population had grown to 120, wrote historian Charles Pierce LeWarne, whose research of Home is documented in his book “Utopias on Puget Sound, 1885-1915.”

Some were attracted by the controversies, which started in 1901 when Home’s newspaper, Discontent, advocated free love. Tacoma’s newspapers denounced the colony. A grand jury recommended that Home’s post office be closed.

In September 1901, when an anarchist in Buffalo, N.Y., fatally shot President McKinley, the eyes of Pierce County turned to Home with fury. The Tacoma Daily Ledger, LeWarne wrote, said “each anarchist should be killed as a wild beast, a mad dog . . . eliminated, tooth and branch.”

Frenzied Tacoma residents tried to reach Home, but the captain who ferried passengers between Home and Tacoma prevented the confrontation by refusing to bring them to Key Peninsula.

The colony continued to grow, attracting radicals from Chicago and California to lecture or visit friends. William Z. Foster, who became the principal communist leader in the nation, was a frequent visitor. Lena Morrow Lewis, a leader in the socialist movement, came, too.

Home’s founding principles began falling away as more people moved there, some attracted by the cheap goods available at the colony’s cooperative. In 1909, the association, with more than 200 members, amended its bylaws and allowed members to obtain the titles to the land on which they lived.

In 1911, four women and two men were charged with indecent exposure for nude bathing in the bay. Jay Fox, an anarchist newspaper editor who had moved to Home the previous year, wrote an editorial, “Nudes and Prudes,” criticizing those who had complained about the sunbathers.

Fox was arrested on charges of advocating disrespect for the law. A jury convicted him but urged a lenient sentence. He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to overturn the conviction, and he served six weeks of a two-month jail sentence before the governor pardoned him.

Much later, he told a reporter that people in Home thought nothing of taking a dip in the bay without their swimsuits. There was nothing obscene about it, no mingling of the sexes.

“I made some rather pointed comment in my paper,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in December 1942, and “the thing went up through the courts. I was charged with printing and publishing matter tending to bring the courts into disrepute. It was persecution, pure and simple.

“Our people may have had radical ideas, but otherwise they conducted themselves like any other decent householders.”

The P-I added a footnote to that story. “The term ‘anarchist’ means one who believes in an absence of government or an irreducible minimum of government, but not necessarily, as it is popularly believed, in the violent overthrow of government or complete destruction of organized society.”Culture lingers The Mutual Home Colony Association was dissolved in 1919, a few months before Eleen Greco was born. But the philosophies that had made the community famous stuck around far longer.

Reading, Greco said, was “the most important thing in the world. I read anything I could get my hands on from the age of 3. That’s what everybody did.”

Music also was part of life. A 1904 survey, author LeWarne wrote, indicated Home had “three pianos, eight organs, eight violins, six guitars, two mandolins, two cornets, one flute and about a half-dozen harmonicas.”

Everyone had a cow and a garden. “There was no such thing as everybody having a job,” Greco said. Her father raised chickens, picked loganberries, was a “jack of all trades.” People could walk wherever they needed to go – unless they needed a lawyer. Then they had to take a bus to Tacoma.

“It is a wonderful thing to grow up without a bar or a tavern or a lawyer or – dare I say it – a church,” Greco said. “You remove all those things and you have a peaceful, talkative community.”

She left Home as a teenager for a job in Tacoma, then moved to Seattle and Los Angeles, New York and Connecticut, finding interesting work wherever she landed. She helped lay out Boeing’s plans for the B-17. She worked for dressmakers and designers and an artist. She married and divorced twice. In 1958, she came back to Home to visit her parents and stayed.

Forty-two years later, she is preparing to move again. She wants to be in the middle of things, to be able to walk or take a bus to lectures, museums, a grocery store that sells homemade bread. “It isn’t enough to walk around the roads here. You need to do something with somebody and talk about it afterwards.”Paradise lost” Home still has interesting people who like the woods, the quiet, the rural feel. Many are retired. Some are loggers; others pick brush in the woods to sell to nurseries for flower arrangements.

There’s a post office, but it carries Lakebay’s name, not Home’s. The community has a laundromat and three convenience stores.

Back in the woods, you may find a teepee or a campsite or an old school bus that serves as shelter. One dirt road leads to Winona Grymes and her family – her grandmother, father, husband, son and nephew – who have set up camp on their property while they build their houses.

“Port Orchard was getting too big,” Grymes said. Home is “a beautiful community, nice and quiet. Trails for our dogs. Birds everywhere. There’s a bald eagle right there.”

Scott Moore, 34, a fifth-generation Home resident, counted five deer in his yard last week. But the peninsula has changed a lot since his childhood. Traffic is ridiculous. “We used to go to Tacoma for a movie, and we’d count cars from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge to Home. Ten or 12 would be a lot. Now, 10 or 12 cars pass before you get out of your driveway.”

He understands the attraction. “You look at this area. There’s so much waterfront. Bays and coves and big, beautiful homes with views. And then you have the back roads that go nowhere with an old school bus at the end. We have real wealthy and dirt poor, and not too many in the middle.”

The live-and-let-live attitude is still prevalent, he said. “Nobody really bothers anybody.” But anarchists are “part of the past.”