Celo Community, Incorporated ( / ˈ s iː l oʊ / SEE -loh ) is a communal settlement in the Western mountains of North Carolina , United States, located in the South Toe River valley of Yancey County , in the South Toe Township between the unincorporated areas of Celo and Hamrick. It was founded in 1937 by Arthur Ernest Morgan . Celo is a land trust with its own rules of taxation and land tenure that runs its internal government by consensus . The community does not require its members to accept any religion or ideology, but is based on ideals of cooperation between residents and care for the natural environment. However, its membership is predominantly Quakers . Celo has 40 families living on its 1,200 acres (4.9 km).
49-454: The Celo Community Constitution states as its overriding purpose “to provide an opportunity for its members to enjoy a life that includes personal expression, neighborly friendship and cooperation, and appreciative care of the natural environment.” In 1959, the community restated its goals. Among these were “to pay allegiance to our common humanity overshadowing religious, racial, economic or political differences.” Members are expected to work “at
98-479: A "Third Way" between capitalism and socialism. The American social commentator and poet Gary Snyder has related that there have been back-to-the-land population movements throughout the centuries, and throughout the world, largely due to the occurrence of severe urban problems where people felt a need to live a better life and/or often simply to survive. The historian and philosopher of urbanism Jane Jacobs remarked in an interview with Stewart Brand that with
147-478: A blockade by German U-boats, a "Dig for Victory" campaign urged civilians to fight food shortages by growing vegetables on any available patch of land. In the USA between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s there was a revived back-to-the-land movement, with substantial numbers of people migrating from cities to rural areas. The back-to-the-land movement has ideological links to distributism , a 1920s and 1930s attempt to find
196-453: A calling that will provide simple but adequate living…to raise some of their own food and in doing so to conserve rather than deplete the land.” The community also stated as a central goal “to rear our children in a wholesome environment where they can become acquainted with nature and be stimulated by intellectual freedom.” Historically and today, cooperation has been at the forefront of the community's mission. Founder Arthur Morgan explained
245-511: A circle of friends and family began the effort in 1968 because Brand believed that there was a groundswell of biologists, designers, engineers, sociologists, organic farmers, and social experimenters who wished to transform civilization along lines that might be called " sustainable ". Brand and cohorts created a catalog of "tools"—defined broadly to include useful books, design aids, maps, gardening implements, carpentry and masonry tools, metalworking equipment, and more. Another important publication
294-416: A clear identity and direction. During this time, Celo also suffered from attacks for its opposition to World War II. In the midst of World War II, Morgan visited Civilian Public Service camps in an attempt to recruit community members. He told the conscientious objectors confined there about Celo, and invited them to move to the community when the war ended. This group proved a receptive audience, and when
343-477: A food co-op , a cooperative retail crafts store, and Cabin Fever University, a program for sharing knowledge and skills as well as for organizing social events. The community is based on a land trust system, by which members may own personal homes, but the land itself (including the land under those homes) is owned by the community. Land is never sold to members, but is assigned for periods of time on
392-407: A meaningful life far from the ignobility of modern warfare, regarding his own experience as typical of the pattern. In Canada , those who sought a life completely outside the cities, suburbs, and towns frequently moved into semi-wilderness environs. However, the later phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s was especially significant because the rural relocation trend was sizable enough to be identified in
441-590: A system of rural universities in India, and fought to protect Native American (Seneca) land from the flooding by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Morgan was the author of more than twenty books. Two in the water field demonstrated his environmental orientation and his criticism of the Army Corps. In 1962 Morgan's daughter-in-law, Elizabeth, with the help of his son Ernest, founded a progressive private school with humanist, Quaker, and Montessori influences, naming it
490-488: Is a call for people to take up smallholding and to grow food from the land with an emphasis on a greater degree of self-sufficiency , autonomy , and local community than found in a prevailing industrial or postindustrial way of life. There have been a variety of motives behind such movements, such as social reform , land reform , and civilian war efforts . Groups involved have included political reformers, counterculture hippies, and religious separatists . The concept
539-426: Is a self-governed land trust. Although Celo does not require members to accept any particular religious creed or ideology, it is built on cooperation between members and care for the natural environment. Today, Celo is home to 40 families who live on its 1,000 acres (4 km ). In the 1940s, Morgan went on to found two organizations for the promotion of community, Community Service Inc. (CSI) in 1940, and in 1949
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#1732798153229588-637: The Epic of Gilgamesh . Regarding North America, many individuals and households have moved from urban or suburban circumstances to rural ones at different times; for instance, the economic theorist and land-based American experimenter Ralph Borsodi (author of Flight from the City ) is said to have influenced thousands of urban-living people to try a modern homesteading life during the Great Depression . The New Deal town of Arthurdale, West Virginia ,
637-769: The Arthur Morgan School . Along with J.J. Tigert , Morgan served as a member of the Indian University Education Commission set up in 1948 with S. Radhakrishnan as a chair and Zakir Husain as a member. The commission studied Land-Grant colleges in agricultural education in the United States. He travelled across India in 1948 as part of the commission and also supported a community education initiative in Kerala called Mitraniketan begun by K. Viswanathan in 1965. Morgan
686-451: The Fall of Rome city dwellers re-inhabited the rural areas of the region. From another point of departure, Yi-Fu Tuan takes a view that such trends have often been privileged and motivated by sentiment. "Awareness of the past is an important element in the love of place," he writes, in his 1974 book Topophilia . Tuan writes that an appreciation of nature springs from wealth, privilege, and
735-524: The TVA , he not only directed the building of dams and provided power; he promoted community living as well. Morgan advanced a wide variety of cooperative enterprises and cottage industries and created a number of planned towns that followed the English garden city model. In 1937, Morgan founded Celo Community , a land trust in the mountains of Western North Carolina. The community, which still exists today,
784-556: The Watergate scandal and the 1973 energy crisis contributed to these views. Some people rejected the struggle and boredom of "moving up the company ladder." Paralleling the desire for reconnection with nature was a desire to reconnect with physical work. Farmer and author Gene Logsdon expressed the aim aptly as: "the kind of independence that defines success in terms of how much food, clothing, shelter, and contentment I could produce for myself rather than how much I could buy ." There
833-526: The counterculture of the 1960s , the two movements had some overlap in participation. Many people were attracted to getting more in touch with the basics mentioned. Still, the movement could also have been fueled by the negatives of modern life: rampant consumerism , the failings of government and society, including the Vietnam War , and a perceived general urban deterioration, including growing public concern about air and water pollution . Events such as
882-477: The "New Deal" gains enjoyed by whites, Morgan remained defiant and unrepentant until his death in 1975. In his memoir of his TVA years, he denied any responsibility for the program's negative effects, claiming that there was nothing else he could do but to honor the attitudes of a racist, majority white America. Back-to-the-land movement A back-to-the-land movement is any of various agrarian movements across different historical periods. The common thread
931-807: The 1930s, Morgan was a member of the Unitarian Church . In his later life, Morgan was a Humanist Quaker , a member of the Society of Friends in Yellow Springs, Ohio , as was his son Ernest. After his departure from the TVA in 1938, Arthur Morgan was active in Quaker war relief efforts in Mexico and Finland. Among other accomplishments in the 1940s, he founded a non-profit organization to promote small communities (Community Service, Inc. ), helped to set up
980-421: The 1950s due to conflicts with ex-members. By the 1960s however, national movements of communal living, back-to-the-land , and radicalism led the population to flourish once again. In 2021, Celo was home to 79 adult members. The community has a slow membership process, and has a waiting list of families hoping to be admitted. Families who are unable to live at Celo due to a long waiting list have begun settling on
1029-485: The American Society of Civil Engineers. After the disastrous Great Dayton, Ohio Flood in 1913, Morgan proposed a system of dry earthen dams to control the river systems above Dayton. His concepts were challenged because of his lack of formal engineering training, but eventually his plans were adopted and constructed, and the subsequent years proved the effectiveness of his concepts. Because of this success, he
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#17327981532291078-580: The American demographic statistics. The roots of this movement can perhaps be traced to some of Bradford Angier 's books, such as At Home in the Woods (1951) and We Like it Wild (1963), Louise Dickinson Rich 's We Took to the Woods (1942) and subsequent books, or perhaps even more compellingly to the 1954 publication of Helen and Scott Nearing 's book, Living the Good Life . This book chronicles
1127-474: The Fellowship of Intentional Communities (FIC). CSI was created to advance family life and small towns, which Morgan saw as the necessary ingredients for a positive American future. The organization was founded on Morgan's belief in the importance of small towns to the rapidly urbanizing nation. Small towns, he argued, provided places for people to experience respect, cooperation, and personal relationships. In
1176-983: The Holocaust. Morgan's views on race greatly informed his actions as head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, leading him to exclude Black Americans from employment and housing opportunities offered to whites by the "New Deal" program. As a result, all-white towns such as Norris, Tennessee, came to characterize his vision for "model" communities. When sued by the NAACP for denying Black Americans equal access to jobs and housing, Morgan pushed back, claiming that "Blacks had to create their own opportunities." To this day, Norris Tennessee remains almost exclusively white, as documented in James W. Loewen's book "Sundown Towns." Despite investigations demonstrating that Morgan's TVA had deliberately excluded Black Americans from
1225-533: The Moraine Park School. Between 1921 and 1933, board members and their friends donated more than $ 2 million to Antioch. Kettering alone donated $ 500,000. Morgan reorganized the educational program to include cooperative education and involved faculty in industrial research. The faculty, most personally chosen by Morgan, included not only academics but also architects, engineers, chemists, advertising executives, and government bureaucrats. Until around
1274-534: The Nearings' move to an older house in a rural area of Vermont and their self-sufficient and simple lifestyle . In their initial move, the Nearings were driven by the circumstances of the Great Depression and influenced by earlier writers, particularly Henry David Thoreau . Their book was published six years after A Sand County Almanac , by the ecologist and environmental activist Aldo Leopold ,
1323-474: The antithetical values of cities. He argues that literature about land (and, subsequently, about going back to the land) is largely sentimental; "little," he writes, "is known about the farmer's attitudes to nature..." Tuan finds historical instances of the desire of the civilized to escape civilization in the Hellenistic , Roman , Augustan , and Romantic eras, and, from one of the earliest recorded myths,
1372-413: The community and offering medical services for relatively low prices. The Community accepts new members by consensus. A vote is held at regular meetings of the community. New admits must receive an affirmative vote with no more than fifteen percent of those present and voting dissenting. Members may also vote to dismiss members from the community. In 1936, wealthy Chicago industrialist William H. Regnery
1421-496: The community running Camp Celo , organizing cottage industries, and working for the settlement itself. Members also work off of the community. At times the work of the community has benefited the wider area. In 1962 Celo Community members Elizabeth and Ernest Morgan founded the Arthur Morgan School, a Quaker boarding school for students in 7th-9th grades. Physicians at Celo once ran a clinic open to people from outside
1470-589: The community's periphery. According to the Köppen Climate Classification system, Celo has an oceanic climate , abbreviated "Cfb" on climate maps. The highest temperature recorded in Celo was 97 °F (36.1 °C) on June 25–26, 1952 and June 28, 1952, while the lowest temperature recorded was −16 °F (−26.7 °C) on January 21, 1985. Arthur Ernest Morgan Arthur Ernest Morgan (June 20, 1878 – November 16, 1975)
1519-497: The condition that members live harmoniously with the land and their neighbors. Money is occasionally lent to community members for the purpose of improving land. In the words of the Celo Community Constitution, this system is meant to “encourage personal enterprise among members by making land and money available” for productive use. The Community does not provide jobs for its residents. Members have worked on
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1568-485: The cooperative element of Celo by employing a metaphor, which he named “human uranium.” Morgan explained that although a cubic yard of granite contains enough uranium to blow up a mountain, the particles have no effect when separated. Only when brought together, in what is called a “ critical mass ,” can they exercise power. Morgan saw people in the same way: when brought together with common goals and ideals they have great power. Examples of Celo's cooperative element include
1617-536: The first president of The Association for the Advancement of Progressive Education, later renamed in 1931 as Progressive Education Association (PEA). In 1919, Morgan accepted the presidency of Antioch College to turn it around after a low point in the college's finances. Morgan replaced the existing board of trustees, which had been dominated by quarrelsome local ministers, with prominent businessmen such as Charles Kettering , who had also backed Morgan's efforts at
1666-465: The innate inferiority of certain races. In particular, he held the view that those of Asian and African descent were "the most unfit of all" peoples. To illustrate this point, Morgan once wrote that, "The extreme and universal immorality of the negro is a bigger blight on the country than people realize." In addition to his belief in white supremacy, Morgan was also a leading proponent of eugenics and what he termed "euthenics". As such, he spoke widely of
1715-486: The need to both extinguish undesirable genetic traits seen among peoples of poor genetic stock and eliminate cultural traits seen among "uncivilized" peoples. With these views, Morgan became a leader in the eugenics movement, serving as a charter member and honorary president of the American Eugenics Society. Adolf Hitler cited the American eugenics movement as an inspiration for what became known as
1764-409: The same year, Morgan founded the Fellowship of Intentional Communities, an organization that fostered relationships between communal settlements. The FIC cultivated communication and the exchange of products between communities, promoted communication between communal settlements and the outside world, and advocated for the formation of new intentional communities. From an early age, Morgan believed in
1813-408: The war ended several families moved to the community. Celo had a stable population by 1948. In that year, Camp Celo, a Quaker summer camp, was established by Doug and Ruby Moody on a holding of community land. In these early years, Celo was populated mostly with Quakers and pacifists, a legacy left by Morgan's recruitment in the conscientious objector camps. Early growth was constant, but slowed during
1862-489: Was The Mother Earth News , a periodical (originally on newsprint) that was founded a couple years after the Catalog . Ultimately gaining a large circulation, the magazine was focused on how-to articles, personal stories of successful and budding homesteaders, interviews with key thinkers, and the like. The magazine stated its philosophy was based on returning to people a greater measure of control of their own lives. Many of
1911-599: Was a civil engineer, U.S. administrator, and educator. He was the design engineer for the Miami Conservancy District flood control system and oversaw construction. He served as the president of Antioch College between 1920 and 1936. He was also the first chairman of Tennessee Valley Authority from 1933 until 1938 in which he used the concepts proven in his earlier work with the Miami Conservancy District. Arthur E. Morgan
1960-417: Was a clarion call for a return to a life of human scale." By the late 1960s, many people had recognized that, leaving their city or suburban lives, they completely lacked any familiarity with such basics of life as food sources (for instance, what a potato plant looks like, or the act of milking a cow)—and they felt out of touch with nature, in general. While the back-to-the-land movement was not strictly part of
2009-486: Was a leading community organizer in the postwar period. He was deeply committed to community and greatly interested in community settlements. Heavily influenced by Edward Bellamy 's Looking Backward , Morgan gained a reputation as a Utopian dreamer. This interest in community living, coupled with Morgan's belief in small towns and family life as the most virtuous form of living, led Morgan to participate in several projects that fostered rural community life. As chairman of
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2058-490: Was also a segment within the movement who were familiar with rural life and farming, had skills, and wanted land of their own on which they could demonstrate that organic farming could be made practical and economically successful. Besides the Nearings and other authors writing later along similar lines, another influence from the world of American publishing was the Whole Earth Catalogs . Stewart Brand and
2107-530: Was born near Cincinnati, Ohio but his family soon moved to St. Cloud, Minnesota . After graduating from high school, he spent the next several years doing outdoors work in Colorado . During this time he learned that there was a dearth of practical understanding of hydraulic engineering . He returned home and took up practice with his father, learning about hydraulic engineering by apprenticeship. By 1910 he had founded his own firm and become an associate member of
2156-684: Was built in 1933 using the back-to-the-land ideas current at the time. After World War II, there was again a fair degree of interest in moving to rural land. In 1947, Betty MacDonald published what became a popular book, The Egg and I , telling her story of marrying and then moving to a small farm on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. This story was the basis of a successful comedy film starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray . The Canadian writer Farley Mowat says that many returned veterans after World War II sought
2205-615: Was chosen in 1933 to design and deploy the Tennessee Valley system of dams for flood control and electrification. Always interested in progressive education, he sent his son Ernest to Marietta Johnson 's Organic School in Fairhope, Alabama, a pioneering progressive boarding school. Morgan's first effort in education was to found the Moraine Park School, an experimental progressive school in Dayton, in 1917. In 1921, Morgan became
2254-566: Was looking for a social project to fund. He asked a friend, Arthur Morgan , to suggest one. Morgan suggested he underwrite the founding of an intentional community. Regnery's beliefs seemed, at first glance, to clash with Morgan's vision for a communal settlement: he was a conservative and mild anti-Semite who opposed the New Deal and Franklin D. Roosevelt . However, his belief in the virtue of self-reliant rural farmers overrode all of these characteristics, and he agreed. With his philanthropy, Celo
2303-523: Was on its way. Morgan, Regnery, and Morgan's son, Griscom Morgan, chose the land that would become Celo. A board of directors was formed, including among its members Morgan, Regnery, and Clarence Pickett , executive secretary of the American Friends Service Committee . During the first few years, Celo experienced frequent turnover of residents and difficulty in recruitment of members as the community struggled to establish
2352-555: Was popularized in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century by activist Bolton Hall , who set up vacant lot farming in New York City and wrote many books on the subject; and by his follower Ralph Borsodi , who is known for his practical experiments in self-sufficient living during the 1920s and 1930s. The practice, however, was strong in Europe even before that time. During World War II , when Great Britain faced
2401-452: Was published in 1948. Influences aside, the Nearings had planned and worked hard, developing their homestead and life according to a twelve-point plan they had drafted. The narrative of Phil Cousineau's documentary film Ecological Design: Inventing the Future asserts that in the decades after World War II , "The world was forced to confront the dark shadow of science and industry... There
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