A continuation of what I was talking about.08:33 May 28 2014
Times Read: 392
Excerpt:
According to Tennal’s narrative of Fuller’s reminiscences, in 1870 London- area workingmen congregated at 18 Denmark Street in Soho to discuss possible ways to alleviate working-class grievances. Among the group were three leaders: John Radford, Jim Murray, and Charley Murray, who spoke to the assemblage about plans for a colony near Goff, Kansas. Edward Grainger Smith, who managed the colonization plan, was another “promoter and prime mover” of the endeavor.
Membership in the “Mutual Land Immigration Operative [sic] Colonization Company, Limited” came through the purchase of £1 shares (to a maximum of fifteen shares) in the colonization company. Plans for the colony called for a fourteen-room communal house, and shareholding members had the right to lease land from the company once property had been obtained in Kansas. Six families originally settled the colony, with twenty more following soon thereafter. Overall, Tennal estimated that a total of fifty families arrived. However, the project ultimately failed because there was no incentive to cooperate communally. In Tennal’s words, “Anyone could have Kansas land almost for the taking at that time.
The colony began operations in 1869 with the arrival of six families from England who were expected to lease the land directly from the company. Radford came to Kansas in 1874 as the organizing agent for the settlement, but the grasshopper plague and cheap land for sale nearby defeated the colony. Cutler noted that “Mr. Wilson, a liberal-minded English gentleman,” took the land off the hands of the “embarrassed colonists.”
Cutler’s brief abstract was buried within Radford’s biographical profile, which itself was a nondescript entry inside the community sketch for the town of Wetmore. The story was incomplete and remained largely unknown outside of local anecdotes. It was another thirty-three years before local newspaper editor Ralph Tennal provided an equally brief but slightly different description. Born in 1872, Tennal was a native Kansan. He had no connection to the colony but possessed a keen interest in the historical record of his home county. In 1916 he published an exhaustive account of Nemaha County that included the story of the English colony. While Tennal was interested in the entire scope of Nemaha County history, the failed colony was a minor codicil to what he saw as a narrative that celebrated progress. Therefore, rather than devote an inordinate amount of time to locating records and collecting the remembrances of as many living participants as possible, Tennal invited one individual to chronicle the colony story for the entire group. The former colonist he chose was John Fuller. In 1916 Fuller was eighty-one years of age and an esteemed resident in the town of Seneca. He was a master tin and coppersmith and the longtime proprietor of a prosperous metalworking shop. Fuller also was an accomplished author who in 1889 composed a comprehensive treatise on his métier entitled the Art of Coppersmithing. Immediately upon release, the distinguished work became the definitive text on the coppersmith’s craft and has remained unsurpassed in the field. Local townsfolk recognized Fuller’s intellectual achievements and acknowledged him with the honorific title “Sage of Seneca.” There was more to Fuller, however, than his abilities as an artisan and scholar. Born and raised in England, in 1870 he and his family emigrated from London to become members of the English colony, the colony Bristow would later identify as Llewellyn Castle, although Fuller never referred to the settlement by that name. Fuller’s reflections were about his own family’s experiences and a troubled colonization effort that failed to live up to the grandiose promises of its founders.
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As far as I know my grandmother knew nothing about any of this. She saw things happen that puzzled her but she never mentioned any communal anything. She was born on a farm in or around Goff, Kansas. I know her brother got into a fight with her father over something and left for good. She never saw him again. I also know the census that lists family members is incorrect. Names here and there are misspelled and the conclusions of who is who is wrong in some cases. My grandmother was born in the late 1800s. She grew up in the Victorian era and even in the 50s she still wore corsets and heavy black tie shoes. I never saw her wear anything other than a dress. She wore hairnets as well. When she was retirement age she had to get affidavits of her birth from those still living and were there so she could collect what she called her pension from the government. She had no birth certificate. They never had her birth verified by a doctor and I'm not sure why. She died in the early sixties. She was 74 she thought.
She talked about the farm and how strict her father was. Also that he had a preference to the boys. Girls stayed in the house and learned household things. I'm sure she talked about a lot of things but I'm trying to remember back to when I was five. She lived in another town from us in the latter part of her life so we didn't have many talks when I was older. I wish my Mother was still alive and I could talk to her about this. None of the kids are that my grandmother had. My mother had been the youngest of them all. I don't know any other relatives that might know some of these things. Still looking to find out what Rex wrote. I'm hoping this writer contacts me. I have my grandfather's box and my grandmother put papers in it after his death that deal with her father's farm and letters too. There are so many mysteries in my family on both sides it's mind boggling.
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