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.
"The commune was to create a demonstration of Wright's emancipation plan: to create a place to educate slaves and prepare them for freedom and colonization in Haiti or Liberia. Wright was strongly influenced by Robert Owen and his utopian community, New Harmony, Indiana. Surviving for three years, Nashoba outlasted New Harmony.
"Wright first expressed her plan of emancipation in an article called "A Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States, without Danger of Loss to the Citizens of the South," which she published in the New Harmony Gazette in October 1825. Wright believed that if she could arrange emancipation without financial loss to slaveholders, planters of the South would use it. She believed that slaveholders were "anxious to manumit their people, but apprehensive about throwing them unprepared into the world." Wright imagined that if her experimental community was successful, its methods could be applied throughout the nation.
"Wright raised funds and recruited people. Among the first were the Englishman George Flower and his family, who had founded another settlement in Albion, Illinois. Wright could not raise sufficient monetary support and ended up using a good portion of her own fortune to buy land and slaves. She called it "Nashoba," the Chickasaw word for "wolf."
"Nashoba is remembered as an egalitarian, interracial community, but it did not reach these goals. While Wright was a champion of emancipation, the slaves in the community were her property until they could buy themselves out. In "Revisiting Nashoba," Gail Bederman says, "Nashoba's continued commitment to colonization and fully compensated emancipation meant that its slaves remained both subordinates and, most fundamentally, property."
"When the compensated emancipation plan failed to produce results, Wright turned Nashoba into a kind of utopian community. The white members of the community became the trustees and were responsible for administering the property and making the decisions. The slaves could never become trustees.
"Wright left Nashoba in 1827 for Europe to recover from malaria. During her absence, the trustees managed the community, but by Wright's return in 1828, Nashoba had collapsed. At its largest, Nashoba had only 20 members.
"Nashoba is described briefly in Frances Trollope's 1832 book Domestic Manners of the Americans. She visited Nashoba with Wright in 1827 and lived in the United States for a few years. Her work was critical of American society for its lack of polish. She thought residents at Nashoba lacked both sufficient provisions and luxuries." ~ Wikipedia
"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.
"With a small group of idealistic young whites that included her sister, Wright formally launched her experiment in the spring of 1826. With the help of about fifteen former slaves whose freedom she had purchased, she and the others set about clearing land and building cabins. But the task was arduous and fraught with difficulties. Sickness and conflict within the little community and controversy sparked among outside critics dogged the settlers at every step.
"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