Nashoba: The Utopia That Tried to End Slavery

In eighteen twenty-five, Scottish-born reformer Frances Wright bought land here on the Wolf River that grew to about two thousand acres and founded Nashoba, one of the most radical utopian experiments in American history.

Her idea was audacious: enslaved people would live and labor alongside free whites, gradually earning their own freedom through cooperative work, then sail to Haiti to start new lives. It was a full-compensation plan designed so slaveholders would have no financial grievance.

At its peak, Nashoba had only twenty residents. Wright fell gravely ill with malaria and left for Europe in eighteen twenty-seven. The colony collapsed in her absence. She later chartered a ship and, in eighteen thirty, carried the remaining formerly enslaved residents to Haiti, where she freed them.

Nashoba failed, but its ideas rippled outward. Frances Wright went on to lecture across the United States on abolition and women's rights, drawing enormous crowds and furious condemnation in equal measure.