Ruskin Colony - Georgia

Georgia

The colony eventually became mired in constant litigation over issues of property, with charter members who were now being pushed out of Ruskin seeking to dismantle the group through legal means. The final auction of the Ruskin Colony site at Cave Mills and most of the communal property left the remaining members with only a fraction of what they had spent five years struggling to build. The 240 members moved what they did have, which still included the newspaper and the printing apparatus for it, 613 miles on a chartered train to their new home in Georgia, where they merged with the Duke Colony in Ware County and formed the Ruskin Commonwealth.

However after its first year in Georgia, the number of colonists dropped by half. The new settlement, an old lumber mill, was not surrounded by the fertile land and good sources of water that the previous location had. Ruskinites were plagued with disease, unprofitable business ventures, and a continual slide into poverty that eventually led to the auction of the property by the county sheriff to settle its debts. The Ruskin Commonwealth was effectively disbanded in the autumn of 1901.