‘There’s a Jewish story every where’: Clarion, Utah

The Jewish Farming Settlement of Clarion, Utah: The Possible, Impossible dream

(Editor’s Note: The following historical article is reprinted with permission from the Winter 2016 edition of Western States Jewish Quarterly.)

By Jerry Klinger

CLARION, Utah — European anti-Semitism had not improved by the latter half of the 19th century. If anything it became more vicious. “What to do with the Jews?” was a standard question among Europe’s finer circles. The Jewish question was the worst in Russia and its vassal areas of Eastern Europe. Jews had been squeezed into an unlivable, small restricted area called the Pale of Settlement.

The Russian solution to the Jewish question was simple, make their lives so miserable, they convert to Christianity, they will voluntarily leave Russia or even more simple, they will die. Millions of Jews, between 1880-1920, voted for life with their feet. They left Russia with nostalgia for their Yiddish culture, a burning hatred for the Czar and the dream of reaching America. For those who made it to America, most settled in the urban areas of the Eastern seaboard, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York in particular. They had removed themselves from the hated Russian lands only to descend into the urban hell of monstrous, tenement congestion and near slave wage labor servitude. They were free but their bodies, their families and their children were oppressed almost without hope of liberation.

A liberation movement then began. America was huge and desperate for settlers to come in and move to the frontier of the American West. America wanted immigrants to turn the virgin sod and plant the soil with fertile farms and democracy. The various Homestead Acts offered land, 160 acres nearly free to anyone who would settle on the land and develop it for five years. For Jews, living within a culture that was inwardly restrictive, not freely lending itself to individual independence beyond walking distance to the synagogue and the physical limits of kosher life, hated by non-Jews outside their self-imposed or imposed ghetto walls, the freedom of the American frontier was an enigma. They knew they could escape the tenements but could they escape being Jewish. If they left the confines of the minyan and went out on their own they became alone. They faced the death of who they were as Jews.

The American frontier emerged as a new opportunity for Jews as it has for Christians. For Jews it was different. Jews generally did not go to the frontier alone. They could and did return to the land, frequently in Yiddish speaking communities. They could organize themselves into idealistic farming settlements of mutual support and maintain their identity as Jews. They could create Jewish solutions to the Jewish urban hell of the Eastern cities.

Jews could show to the outside world that Jews were not economic parasites. They could successfully make their living from the land as free and equal people with their neighbors. Jews did not have to live and die as economic slaves to the power of capital but could take their children, their families along with their friends and start Jewish communities on the frontiers of America. They could return to the soil, even if it was not the soil of the true Zion. It was the soil of the New Zion—America.

Between 1880 and 1911 over twenty five Jewish return to the soil agrarian efforts were attempted. Most were utopian and communal in character. Most began as quasi-socialist communal endeavors clearing and settling the land. All eventually failed for a variety of reasons; lack of capital, lack of agricultural experience, natural calamity, disease, internal dissensions, etc. The very nature of communal ownership failed when faced with the challenge of the frontier. The evident benefits of private ownership of land and labor gave the fruits to those who were the best not just because they were members of the group. Individual initiative proved more enduring than the initial communal need. With their eventual dissolutions, a few private Jewish farms did survive into the 20th century, but only a few.

Yet it was in the West, far from the large centers of concentrated Jewish life in the East that Jews were forced to face the harsh necessity to adapt. The frontier was liberating and the frontier was also threatening. Most Jews chose to remain in their constricting urban cocoons but some did hear the Clarion call of the West.

“It (Clarion) isn’t just a story about a failed attempt at colonization. It’s a story of idealism, vision, purpose and sacrifice, and of people trying to do something good for their people.”

Life on the Land

In 1911, the Jewish Agricultural and Colonial Association of Philadelphia purchased 6,085 acres of land and water rights from the Utah State Land board for the agricultural experiment that they would name Clarion. Members of the association tasked with selecting a site for the future colony reported to their friends and neighbors in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York City that the soil was fertile, that a new source of irrigation, the state-built Piute Canal, would soon be completed, and that in all respects this site would meet the needs and aspirations of the would-be farmers.

Clarion was to be settled in phases, beginning with the arrival of twelve men who would work collectively to prepare the land for planting and irrigation. Thereafter, the land would be divided into family farmsteads with equipment shared by the settlers. Families would arrive, 50 at a time, from year to year, until all of the Association members had been relocated from the East.

Unfortunately, the Clarion settlers found that life in arid Utah was quite different from the promises made by their back–to the-soil leaders and Utah state officials. The soil proved to be very poor and only productive with extensive irrigation. While the success of the colony depended on a reliable supply of water for both irrigation and domestic needs, construction of the Piute Canal, intended to be completed before the arrival of the colonists in 1911, was not even finished until 1918, two years after the demise of Clarion. The limited water that was available was insufficient to meet the needs of the colony and the requirements of the land itself to become fully productive.

The Colonists of Clarion

For the Jewish settlers who came to Utah, Clarion was not just a theoretical experiment; it was a real opportunity to escape the poverty and stress of life in the ghettos of the eastern cities, for themselves as well as their families. As the colony’s name reveals, they also looked beyond themselves. These colonists had sounded a Clarion call to all Jews to return to the land for spiritual and physical revival. In Utah, they believed that they had found a haven from the violence of the European pogroms and the poverty of America.

Benjamin Brown recommended the Utah site for colonization to the other members of the Association and was the leader of the settlers in Clarion. The colonists raised wheat, alfalfa, and oats and kept chickens and cows on their forty-acre farms. The Association subsidized families with a weekly stipend to ease the transition from city to farm. At its high point, more than two hundred men, women and children lived in the colony and over 2,800 acres were under cultivation. Relations with local Mormon farmers were valuable for they helped the Jewish colonists gain experience in working the land and raising animals. But, tragedy marked the life of the Jewish colony. The Piute Canal failed to deliver promised water. Early and late frosts and heavy rainfall that flooded fields brought crop failures. A lack of experience aggravated natural calamities, and dissension rooted in ideology, missed expectations, and personality conflicts weakened morale. The deaths of two farmers and the loss of two babies further weakened the will to stay on the land. In 1915, the colony could not make payment on the land and the State of Utah foreclosed. Most colonists returned to their former homes in the eastern cities. Unwilling to give up on their dream, half a dozen Jewish families took up land near the Clarion tract and successfully farmed into the late 1920’s.

The hurdles to success on the land proved too high and the Jewish farmers could not sustain their experiment. Nor would they lead a movement of Jews back to the soil. Yet, their story is one of hope and determinations to better themselves and a people. “That they failed is their history. That they dreamed and struggled against insurmountable odds is their legacy. “

Back to the Soil

From the beginning of the Common Era and into the nineteenth century, European Jews were prohibited from owning land. By necessity, Jews abandoned an agrarian existence and turned to a more urban way of life, becoming instead shopkeepers, peddlers, and artisans. But, by the middle of the 19th Century, Jewish reformers and Zionist nationalists advocated a return to a “purer life” and occupations based on manual labor. Key to this was agriculture. As early as the 1840s Jewish communal societies were proposed in both Europe and in America where it was hoped Jews could achieve these ideals by returning to the soil.

The pogroms (violent and usually deadly anti-Jewish riots) of the 19th Century saw the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe, who came to America with hopes of religious and economic freedom. The great majority of the Jews settled in the eastern cities. Others participated in an international movement that saw farm colonies planted in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil and Israel. Forty agricultural colonies were organized in the United States at places such as Sicily Island, Louisiana, Crimea and Painted Woods in South Dakota; new Odessa, Oregon; and Cotopaxi in Colorado. Clarion, Utah was the largest in population and land areas and was in existence the longest of any settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. Many communities suffered catastrophic natural disasters, while others succumbed to mismanagement, poor soils, and settler’s unfamiliarity with farm practices. All but a couple failed and were abandoned with a few years of their founding. Today, virtually all have disappeared.

In the early 20th Century, renewed pogroms and emigration from Eastern Europe added to the already overcrowded conditions in the cities of the eastern United States. Even president Theodore Roosevelt endorsed for all Americans a “Back to the Farm” movement and established the Country Life Commission in 1908 to seek means to keep farmers on the land and to encourage new agricultural enterprises. These ideas would have been familiar to Jewish immigrants who had heard similar schemes in their homelands even before their popularity in America.

Honoring the memory of the centennial of the Jewish settlement of Clarion, Utah, a concurrent resolution of the Utah Legislature and Governor was issued. The words written with sincerity, respect and decorum reflect the support of the people of Utah for the Clarion project then and honor them today. [See back cover of this journal.]

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Jerry Klinger is President of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation. See www.JASHP.org.  Other articles in the Winter 2016 issue of Western States Jewish History deal with the Rambam Torah Institute of Los Angeles; architect Raphael Soriano; Rabbi Wollo Kaelter; Christian Zionist William E. Blackstone; and the restoration of an historic Jewish cemetery in Vancouver, British Columbia.  More information about the quarterly publication may be obtained by calling (818) 225-9631.