Equality Colony - Equality Colony

Equality Colony

By mid 1897 the BCC had about 2200 members in 130 local unions. After short tours in Tennessee and Arkansas, Lermond announced that August that Washington would be the most likely state for colonization. The southern states were already well settled and faced the "Negro question", while Washington had a small, sparse population with liberal inclinations and a Populist governor who was rumored to be sympathetic to the BCC. There were also a number of local unions already in the state, seven of which had sites available. On September 1, 1897 Ed Pelton left Maine for the Pacific Northwest to secure land for the colony. After visiting several sites, on October 15 he made a down payment of $100 to Mathias Decker, a conservative Skagit County farmer, for 280 acres (1.1 km2) of land east of Blanchard. Additional purchases and contributions were made until the colony reached an area of 600 acres (2.4 km2) by the summer of 1898.

The first fifteen settlers arrived on November 1, 1897 and named the colony "Equality" after Edward Bellamy's new book. By the time that the national board, their families and others arrived in March, the first building, Fort Bellamy, was finished and several others were in progress. However most members of the BCC board stayed in nearby Edison, where they leased a "national headquarters" for the brotherhood. By that summer membership had reached 3,000 members and 18 states had organizers. Through the organization department and the group's newspaper, Industrial Freedom (which began in May), the Brotherhood maintained its "national character".

However, dissension developed between the colonists at Equality and the BCC leaders at Edison. The colonists resented that their money was being used to keep the administration in town, while they lived in the crude, unfinished buildings at the colony site. They also objected to the administration's emphasis on the creation of a national organization and other colonies, feeling that the more immediate goal should be the completion of Equality. In early April, at a contentious meeting of the two factions, a plan to start an additional colony at Edison of the administrators was defeated and the Equality colonists proposed an amendment giving the colony complete independence in internal affairs, which passed by a vote of 298 to 176.

That August Lermond resigned from the BCC and returned to Maine, where he founded a new group, the Industrial Brotherhood. By the end of the year, most of the board members had left. In January 1899, a new slate of officers favored by the colonists was elected, and that February BCC headquarters was moved to Equality. From that point membership in the BCC fell to nearly 300, material support and new members from the outside dried up and Industrial Freedom circulation plummeted. The Brotherhood of the Co-operative Commonwealth as an organization was subsumed by Equality. While lip service was given to the idea of planting new colonies and socializing Washington for the next few years little was actually done toward those objectives and were eventually forgotten.

The colony flourished for a few years, building two large apartments, a barn, a dining room and kitchen, a school house, a public hall, a store room, a printing office, a saw mill, a root house, a blacksmith and copper shop, an apiary, a bakery, a cereal and coffee house, and a milk house. Its population fluctuated, but was about 100 by the spring of 1903, when only the "die hards" remained. Harry Ault, who would later play a role in the Seattle general strike of 1919 as editor as the Seattle Union Record, arrived in April 1898 and began to learn journalism and printing by working on Industrial Freedom. He eventually became its editor, until the publication folded in December 1902. He also started Young Socialist in 1899 for the colony's children.

In 1900 and 1901 some colonists left Equality to found a new community on Whidbey Island called the Free Land Association, or Freeland. This colony should not be confused with Equality in its later stages which was sometimes referred to as Freeland Colony.