Special Collections Library Henry Madden Library
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY HENRY MADDEN LIBRARY CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FRESNO TOPOLOBAMPO COLLECTION, 1836-1979 44.75 linear feet ACQUISITION: Part of the collection was donated by Viola Gabriel in 1955. The remainder was donated by Ray Reynolds in 1972. Some photographs were donated by Lois Sinclair in 1990. Various materials were donated by the Kneeland family over the years. ACCESS: The collection is open for research. COPYRIGHT: Copyright to Ira Kneeland’s photographs has been transferred to California State University, Fresno. Copyright to other materials has not been transferred. PHOTOGRAPHS: In boxes 4, 16, 33, 34 and 35. Original glass plate negatives stored in a filing cabinet. PROCESSED BY: Ronald Mahoney and Special Collections staff, 1970s; Linda Sitterding, 1999; Nathan N. Orgill, 2000; Tammy Lau, 2001-2002, and Heather Crowder, 2002. Topolobampo Collection History The Topolobampo cooperative colony was founded at Topolobampo Bay near Los Mochis, Sinaloa, Mexico, by a group of American colonists in 1886. The colony was established and governed under a set of idealistic bylaws, predicated on socialistic reforms. The driving force behind the colonization effort was Albert Kimsey Owen (1847-1916). After a brief stint as a civil servant in Chester, Pennsylvania, twenty-four-year-old Owen began working as a surveyor and civil engineer for William J. Palmer and the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. Palmer formed a surveying party, which included Owen, whose mission was to reconnoiter a proposed railroad or surface road to Mexico City in 1872. After reaching Mexico City, Owen was sent to Mexico's west coast to look for promising harbor sites, and there he had his first look at Topolobampo Bay. From 1873 through 1880 Owen worked to implement his dream of a port at Topolobampo Bay. He won approval of his plan for canals, highways and rail travel in Mexico. Owen quickly organized an American syndicate and with fourteen other members of the United States contingent, embarked on a journey in late August of 1880, bound for Vera Cruz, Mexico. The ship was lost in a hurricane off the coast of Florida with only four survivors. The accident cost Owen five years. Concessions were lost, plans and contracts had to be renegotiated. Finally in 1885, Owen was once again ready to return to Mexico. Owen’s original plan was to build a railroad from Texas to Topolobampo (the Texas, Topolobampo, and Pacific Railroad). However, having grown up with a Quaker father and having lived for a time at Robert Owen’s (no relation to him) utopian colony in New Harmony, Indiana, A. K. Owen was a staunch and idealistic Socialist in addition to being a railroad promoter and engineer. Thus, his new plans included a cooperative colony in Sinaloa where the reorganization of labor and distribution followed the principles laid out in his essay "Integral Co- Operation." This socioeconomic treatise determined that labor was the source of all wealth, and that wealth, the end product of labor, should be justly dispersed through a system of credits. Out of this plan for a better world came the Credit Foncier Company of Sinaola. The Credit Foncier Company issued stock, script and credits in return for labor, which benefited the colony. It was also the agency used to acquire and hold land for Owen and the colony. Plans for the colony included a grand city called Pacific City, based on Owen’s utopian ideal, as well as several agricultural colonies along the Fuerte River to the north of Topolobampo Bay. The railroad and the colony were to be mutually beneficial, each to stimulate growth of the other. However, the colony never had much success and the premature settling of twenty-seven colonists at Topolobampo in 1886 ultimately concluded with the "grand 2 Topolobampo Collection History (cont.) experiment's" failure. The reasons were multifarious and complex. Although Christian B. Hoffman, a Kansas businessman, and Michael Flürscheim, a German land reformer, tried to infuse new life into the colony and mediate between all the factions that splintered the colonists, their efforts failed. In fact, this further divided the colonists into the Owen supporters versus the Hoffman/Flürscheim supporters. The whole episode was referred to as “the conspiracy” and involved many tense meetings and a flurry of communication back and forth. It was a battle fought in public, both in Mexico and the United States, through two newspapers−Owen’s New City and Hoffman’s Integral Co-Operator. The Hoffman/Flürscheim camp tried to form their own co-operative, called the Freeland Co- Operative Society, based in Libertad in Sinaloa. Though the co-operative never became a reality, the Hoffman/Flürscheim group did manage to build an irrigation ditch to foster agriculture. Many personalities came into play in Sinaloa: Marie Howland, a socialist author and editor of the Credit Foncier of Sinaloa; Christian B. Hoffman, organizer of the Kansas-Sinaloa Investment Company, initially formed to purchase land for the floundering Credit Foncier; and John W. Lovell, a publisher and ardent reformer who was a loyal supporter of Owen. Yet, in the end, it was Owen who was held ultimately responsible for the failure of the colony. Albert K. Owen left the colony in 1893, never to return. He continued to publish optimistic views of the colony in New City but by then the colony was, for all intents and purposes, defunct. The land was eventually cultivated by the Sinaloa Sugar Company (run by B.F. Johnston). Owen’s proposed railroad, which eventually became Arthur E. Stilwell’s Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railroad (later the Chihuahua and Pacific Railroad), was not fully realized until 1962. Scope and Content Note The Topolobampo Collection measures 44.75 linear feet and dates from 1836 to 1979. The collection is arranged in six series: Owen, Albert K., Colonists and correspondents, Colony, Railroads, Scrapbooks and Photographs. The majority of the collection came from Viola Gabriel, whose aunt, Clarissa Kneeland, had received it from Louise B. Owen, Albert K. Owen’s widow. The Kneelands were colonists at Topolobampo who stayed on in Mexico until the Mexican Revolution forced them to flee. The rest of the collection was donated by different members of the Kneeland family and by Ray Reynolds, a former Fresno State College instructor and author of Cat’s Paw Utopia, a book about Owen and Topolobampo. A grandnephew of Owen’s in New York gave Reynolds most of this material. 3 Topolobampo Collection Scope and Content Note (cont.) The Owen, Albert K. series (1836-1949) contains correspondence, legal records and printed materials, all of which relate to Owen’s work at Topolobampo, as well as his writings on utopian colonies and socialism. The bulk of the series is comprised of Owen’s correspondence concerning the colony at Topolobampo although there are some materials about a few of his projects that were not related to Topolobampo, such as the Texcoco-Huehuetoca Canal, before the colony started, and building highways, after the colony failed. The Colonists and correspondents series (1872-1979) is composed primarily of the correspondence of colonists and people outside the colony who were interested in it. It is arranged alphabetically by individual. Among the most important of these people are: Christian B. Hoffman, Michael Flürscheim, John W. Lovell, Edward and Marie Howland and the Kneeland family, in particular, Clarissa and Ira Kneeland. There is one letter each to Owen from Nellie Bly and Collis P. Huntington. The Colony series (1864-1966) is arranged by broad subject categories, most notably: Agriculture, Arts, Construction, Credit Foncier Company, Ethnic groups, Finance corporations and stock companies, Lands and estates, Mexico and Newspapers. The finance corporations and stock companies include all the investment vehicles formed to fund the colony. The newspapers are the official newspapers created for the colonists and their supporters. These are: Edward and Marie Howland’s Credit Foncier of Sinaloa, Albert K. Owen’s New City, Christian B. Hoffman’s Integral Co-Operator and a draft of a newspaper called The Wave that apparently never got off the ground. The Railroads series (1872-1974) consists of documents about the various railroad schemes that proliferated during the 1880s and 1890s. Some of these directly relate to Owen; others do not. However, Owen was avidly interested in all railroad projects, either as models, competitors or partners for his own plans. The Scrapbooks (1871-1914) are arranged alphabetically by topic. They contain newspaper clippings that were kept and organized by different departments in the Credit Foncier Company, numbered I through X, and include the following: Agriculture, Construction, Education, Energy and metallurgy, Law and arbitration, Manufacturing, Mexico, Public order and sanitation, Railroads and Supplies. The Photographs (1886-1907) are divided into two main parts. The first concerns the original donation, which came with Ira Kneeland’s (Kneeland was the colony’s official photographer) 505 glass plate negatives, from which a print of each image was made. These prints are numbered and identified individually and are housed in binders. The first 73 are labeled and numbered using Kneeland’s original list (available in this series). The rest were arbitrarily numbered, although grouped into broad categories. The list of the 505 photographs 4 Topolobampo Collection Scope and Content Note (cont.) can be found at the end of the finding aid. The list lacks numbers 187 through 227 because these images are of the Kneeland family in Colorado before they moved to the colony as well as in Mexico, after the colony failed. Thus, those photographs are housed in the Kneeland Family Papers. All 505 of the glass plate negatives are in numerical order and are kept in a filing cabinet. The second section is comprised of original prints that Ira Kneeland created which were donated much later by his descendant, Lois Sinclair.