Utopia, Ohio: The Perfect Society That Wasn't

By the eighteen forties, the Ohio River valley was dotted with communities that believed they could build a better world. One of them was a commune founded by reformer John Otis Wattles on the north bank of the Ohio, a communal settlement organized around the utopian ideals sweeping American reform circles at the time. The community never grew large, but it was earnest.

Then, on December thirteenth, eighteen forty-seven, the Ohio River flash-flooded with devastating speed. Most of Wattles' community was killed. The survivors, few in number and broken in spirit, scattered.

The dream of a perfect society in this particular bend of the river was over. The anarchist philosopher Josiah Warren reorganized what remained of the settlement that same year into a new experiment in individual property and labor exchange, keeping the old name. The town of Utopia, Ohio, carried on as an unusual experiment for decades afterward, which is perhaps its own kind of comment.