Equality Colony
Norman Wallace Lermond, a journalist and farmer in Warren, Maine, and Ed Pelton had been intrigued by an idea originally suggested by Socialist Labor Party member F.G.R.
His immediate model was the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which colonized Kansas with abolitionists prior to the U.S. Civil War in order to make the territory a free state.
[1] Lermond started the first local union in Warren on October 18, 1895, and Pelton established the second in Damariscotta Mills, Maine that winter.
In December 1895, Lermond issued a call for the creation of more local unions in the pages of the New York Commonwealth and the Coming Nation.
A formal "call" for this convention was published in Coming Nation July 11 and 18, and was endorsed by Henry Demarest Lloyd, Eugene Debs, Frank Parsons, William D. P. Bliss and Eltweed Pomeroy.
The Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth was officially organized through a mail referendum conducted through the Coming Nation, which was quickly becoming the movement's semi-official newspaper.
[3] On September 19, the Coming Nation announced the adoption of a constitution and the election of seven officers: Lloyd as president, Lermond as secretary, B. Franklin Hunter as treasurer, Frank Parsons dean, Morrison I.
[6] However, Debs was at the time a fledgling socialist preoccupied with miners' union strikes in the Mountain West and never served in an active capacity as the BCC's organizer.
Debs nevertheless warmed up to the idea of colonizing a relatively unpopulated western state and making use of the ballot box to win control of state government and maintained close contact with the organization, meeting with Lermond in Terre Haute on May 24 to discuss possible unification of his American Railway Union with the BCC at convention scheduled three weeks later.
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.
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 in Blanchard, Washington located 2 miles northeast of the hamlet of Edison.
[17] In 1900 and 1901 some colonists left Equality to found a new community on Whidbey Island called the Free Land Association, or Freeland.
[20] The final factor in the demise of the colony occurred on February 6, 1906, when an unknown person or group of people set fire to several buildings at night.
A suit was filed in Skagit County to dissolve the colony[21] and the BCC went into receivership; its history ended when its land was sold for $12,500 to John J. Peth on June 1, 1907.
