Aurora: Oregon's Utopian Colony
Near Dundee, Oregon
The town of Aurora was born out of a dream of Christian communal perfection. In eighteen fifty-six, a Prussian-born preacher and apothecary named Wilhelm Keil purchased a donation land claim along the Pudding River and named the settlement after his daughter. He had already built one utopian colony in Bethel, Missouri, but felt the outside world pressing in too close. Oregon seemed far enough.
At its peak in eighteen sixty-eight the Aurora Colony numbered about six hundred members and controlled fifteen thousand acres, farming, orcharding, and running a hotel. Members held no private property. Keil held absolute authority. When he died in eighteen seventy-seven the experiment unraveled within six years. The colony officially dissolved in eighteen eighty-three, and the town incorporated a decade later. Today the Aurora Colony Museum preserves the story of one of the Pacific Northwest's most unusual nineteenth-century experiments.
