Gaye LeBaron: Remembering Sonoma County’s Utopian communities

One of the things you learn when you dabble in history, either world or local, is that nothing ever really goes away. The search for a perfect world is … well, a perfect example.

In Sonoma County's history “ancient” and recent, from the Utopian movement of the 19th century to the smoky uber- rural clusters of homemade homes in the coastal mountains, there are many stories to be told.

They were brought to mind again earlier this month when I stood in the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, surrounded by the paintings and drawings and a crowd of friends, students and admirers of Bill Wheeler.

The memorial for Wheeler, who died last year, was not only a tribute to the man some called “The King of Hippies,” but a moment of time travel back to the 1960s and '70s, when Wheeler's 300 steep acres above the Pacific and Lou Gottlieb's 31-acre Morning Star Ranch blazed a trail from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury into the hills of west county.

Standing among the crowd that honored Wheeler, watching those whose hands were held high as emcee Ernie Carpenter asked who among them had been Bill's art student or had lived at Wheeler Ranch or Morning Star, was another lesson from the past, this one about the recurring themes of human existence.

It seems that Luther Burbank's famous letter to his mother describing Sonoma County as the “chosen spot of all the earth,' was taken to heart from the earliest years as a destination for Utopian experiments.

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THE WORD “Utopian” comes from a 16th century novel by Thomas Moore about a perfect world. Meaning, literally, “nowhere,” the term was used in 19th century America to describe a movement creating intentional communities, primarily Christian and/or socialist, in the years before the Civil War. Some have made significant contributions to the broader society.

California came late to the Utopian movement. However, in the last quarter of the 19th century, there were seven recognized Utopian communities in the state. And four of them were in Sonoma County.

The first, dating to 1875, was the Brotherhood of the New Life on the northern edge of Santa Rosa. Calling its community Fountaingrove, it was the most successful. It lasted the longest (60 years and more) and boasted of 1,000 members in the United States and Great Britain.

Preston, a health-based community led by a self-proclaimed minister and healer, “Madam” Emily Preston, formed a town just north of Cloverdale in 1885.

And there were two others, comparatively short-lived. Icaria Speranza (1881-86) was a French-speaking agriculture community just south of Cloverdale, the last of several political and agrarian settlements across the nation based on the communal theories of a French writer named Étienne Cabet. Altruria, (1894-95) a Unitarian experiment taken from a novel by popular late 19th century author William Dean Howells, was on Mark West Springs Road, a mile above Redwood Highway. It lasted less than a year.

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THESE PIONEER seekers led the parade, opened the door, whatever, for the next significant period of discontent that resulted in an explosion of alternative societies. It was lots of things, all related: Vietnam, politics in general, the long-term effect of the changes in education that came with the GI Bill and many other factors after World War II. None of these things “just happen,” anymore than Lou Gottlieb and Bill Wheeler just happened to pick Sonoma County.

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GOTTLIEB, a 39-year-old Berkeley resident with a music doctorate from Cal and a member of the popular Limeliters folk group, was making a real estate investment in 1962 when he bought 31 acres with the remains of a hillside chicken farm and apple orchard off Graton Road not far from Occidental.

Gottlieb, as any who encountered him would tell you, was, in the words of the day, “a trip.”

He set forth his complex theories of open land, hallucinogenics, the perils of technology and truths gained from reincarnation in a recorded interview by Santa Rosa teacher James Walls in 1970.

He had deeded the ranch to God (a gift that would be declined by the state Supreme Court) and had seen dozens of makeshift shacks and tree houses on his property bulldozed under orders of the county health department.

The interview is a trip unto itself. He established his erudition at the outset, using words like “vouchsafed” and “recherché” in the first 90 seconds and peppering the remainder of his interview with dozens of phrases from Hindi, Sanskrit, the Quran and Scriptures.

If you've got a couple of hours and want to know more, you can access the audio in the special collections section on the Sonoma State University library's website.

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YOU CAN HEAR Bill Wheeler, too, in a 2002 video interview in SSU's special collections. Wheeler, a Yale graduate in art and architecture, was soft-spoken, good-humored. In the interview, he looks back with clear eyes to the time when up to 400 people flowed into the side hills and canyons of his property off Coleman Valley Road.

There is regret, remembering a baby, the body of a young woman buried there, of a hepatitis outbreak, of not paying enough attention.

One thing is clear: unlike Morning Star, his Wheeler Ranch was not an “intentional community” by most definitions of the term. People came in big numbers after Morning Star was cleared. And Bill, immersed in his own ‘60s vision of art and the simple life in his studio, just let it happen.

In the interview Wheeler is quick to point out “They were good people. We didn't have the flow of people from the highway that were disruptive.”

Gottlieb didn't pay attention to those who came and went, spending most of his day honing his music skills on a grand piano in a specially constructed addition to the ranch's egg house, paying no heed to comings-and-goings.

“He intended to make his debut at Carnegie Hall by age 50,” Wheeler remembered.

Asked about rules or any sort code that governed the residents of the rough-hewn houses - some architectural wonders - that grew quickly, Wheeler demurred, except to comment on the creative architecture.

Wheeler's easy welcome came to the same rough end as Gottlieb's casual experiment. County officials, predictably, showed up with inspections, warrants and finally, bulldozers to clear the land.

Bill exiled himself to the Marin coast for months, and healed his psychic wounds in an unsuccessful attempt to write a book before returning to the ranch to rebuild his studio and return to his artwork.

Gottlieb died in 1996. It was years after his ethereal dream was lost in a clatter of bulldozers and muddle of legal documents that he returned to his Occidental ranch. Wheeler recalled, “We built a little cabin for him and he was able to spend his last years there. And that was pretty wonderful.”

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GOTTLIEB'S predication in his 1970 interview that the New Age would come in 10 years is now 40 years overdue. But Bill Wheeler's good works - including his fine pen and ink drawings from recent years - are treasured by art collectors. The students from his drawing classes will be disciples for the rest of their artistic lives. His surviving partners in the “plein air” group known as the Sonoma Four, Tony King and Jack Stuppin, were part of his memorial crowd. The fourth, Sonoma State's Bill Morehouse, died in 1993.

Also present was Bay Area author Ramon Sender Barayon, the first resident of Morning Star, who articulated a complex philosophy of open land for both communities. He has compiled dozens of interviews from residents of Morning Star in a 2017 book called Home Free Home - memories of the era from almost everyone who was there, who remembers.

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WE CAN PLAY the essay question game and compare and contrast in multiples: Wheeler Ranch and Morning Star, Fountaingrove and Morning Star, Gottlieb and Wheeler, Thomas Lake Harris and Gottlieb.

We can try to understand them and what they hoped to accomplish. But we can't begin to count all the others, all the well-meaning enterprises and crazy schemes in the ongoing search for Utopia. Which, don't forget, means “nowhere.”