Greeley

Right on State 37 through dense woods to GREELEY, 1.7 m. (1,100 alt., 350 pop.), where in 1842 Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune (1841-72), founded a colony based on the Utopian Socialist ideas of Francois Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837). Fourier's plan proposed the organization of society into self-sufficient groups of 1,600, called phalanxes, each inhabiting a phalanstery.

The colony, Sylvania, modeled on Brook Farm and organized on the principle of 'common ownership of property and the equal division of labor,' started with a capital of $10,000; membership shares sold for $25 each, most of which were bought by Greeley. The Sylvania Society bought several thousand acres of wild land, erecting a large common building and communal shops. The directing board, however, experienced difficulty in assigning tasks to everyone's satisfaction. Greeley decreed that a woman should rule the colony. Many of the three or four hundred colonists, among them wayward scions of affluent New York families, fled the rigors of a place which, as Greeley later complained, could raise only snakes and stones. The experiment did not survive the crop failure of 1845, brought on by a late frost (July 4). Some of the present residents of the resort village are descended from Sylvania colonists.