Silkville: A Frenchman's Utopia

In eighteen sixty-nine, a French aristocrat named Ernest de Boissière arrived in Franklin County, Kansas, with a plan to build utopia. He had the philosophy, Charles Fourier's vision of cooperative communities called phalansteries, where people would share labor and live in common. And he had the money. He purchased three thousand one hundred and fifty-six acres of prairie, imported dozens of French families, planted eight thousand mulberry trees, and released silkworms into the Kansas air.

De Boissière had been driven from France when Napoleon the Third seized power in eighteen fifty-one. He had spent time in New Orleans before turning west, and something about the emptiness of Kansas seemed to him like the right canvas for an experiment. The chateau he built was the largest private manor in the state, sixty rooms that could hold fifty to one hundred people comfortably.

For a time, it worked. Silkville, as the colony came to be known, produced genuine silk. At the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in eighteen seventy-six, the colony's silk won praise. De Boissière was proving that cooperative labor on the Kansas prairie could produce something refined enough to exhibit alongside the great industrial achievements of the age.

But cooperative communities are fragile. Settlers drifted away. Markets for handmade silk proved difficult to sustain against industrial competition. By the early eighteen eighties the experiment was over. De Boissière dismantled what he had built and returned to France, leaving behind the mulberry trees and the memory.

Silkville vanished so thoroughly that today only the name of the nearby post office preserves it. But for a decade, in the middle of Kansas, a French exile tried to prove that people could organize themselves differently, and for a moment, the silkworms cooperated.