Nashoba - Memphis, Tennessee
Posted by: YoSam.
N 35° 10.324 W 089° 52.084
16S E 238795 N 3895891
Another social experiment to create a liberal commune, a utopia, which failed.
Waymark Code: WM113QQ
Location: Tennessee, United States
Date Posted: 08/11/2019
Views: 1
County of marker: Shelby County
Location of marker: Summer Ave. & Sycamore View Road, Memphis
Marker erected by: Tennessee Histoecal Commission
Marker number: 4E 10
Marker text:
4E 10
NASHOBA
To the south lay this plantation. Here, in 1827, a Scottish spinster heiress named Frances Wright set up a colony whose aims were the enforcement of cooperative living and other advanced sociological experiments. It failed in 1830.
"Nashoba was a short-lived, but internationally famous, utopian community on the present-day site of Germantown in Shelby County. Nashoba was founded in 1826 by Frances Wright, who dreamed of demonstrating a practical and effective alternative to the South’s slave-based agricultural economy. Hardly a trace of the community could be seen by 1830, but Nashoba survives in historical accounts of American utopias.
"But Nashoba and its abandoned residents tugged at her conscience. In December 1829 she returned there to find thirty-one black residents barely holding body and soul together. She offered to take them to Haiti, where they could live as free people in a black-ruled nation, and the small group favorably received her offer. Early in 1830 the entire population of Nashoba and Wright sailed from New Orleans for Haiti. The young country’s president, Jean Pierre Boyer, who had been alerted to their arrival by the ever-helpful General Lafayette, greeted the group at Port-au-Prince. Thus ended the short and stormy life of Nashoba." ~ Tennessee Encyclopedia