Mohegan Colony Association Collection

The Mohegan Colony Association is an organized group of homeowners concentrated in the Mohegan Lake area of Westchester County, New York, with property spanning the areas of Cortlandt, Yorktown, and Crompond. The Mohegan Colony was founded on ideas of creative expression, freethinking, and progressive education in 1923 by anarchist leader and progressive educator, Harry Kelly (1871-1953). The center of the community was the Mohegan Modern School, a libertarian school organized according to the educational principles of Francisco Ferrer, the Spanish anarchist who established the first modern school, the Escuela Moderna in Spain. By 1950, the political demographics of Mohegan Colony had changed, and the community was reincorporated in 1952 with a new constitution. From 1952 to the present day, Mohegan Colony, now known as the Mohegan Colony Association, has operated as a homeowners' association, with its primary purpose being the maintenance of community-owned property.

Origins

While Mohegan Colony was established during the last years of the American anarchist movement, it had its orgins in earlier anarchist efforts, specifically the first American modern school at the Ferrer Center in New York City. Opened in 1911, the Ferrer Center originally operated as an adult education center, with a children's day school opening later that year. The modern school's philosophy was "freedom in education,"(1) and advocated creativity and self-expression. Kelly acted as chairman of the Francisco Ferrer Association and worked closely with well-known anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. By 1914, Kelly and other school administrators decided to move the school to Stelton, New Jersey, after an increase in violent activities broke out among the New York anarchist community. Kelly felt that the violence, and the internal disputes that came to characterize the Ferrer Center because of it, were harmful to the students' development as "free spirits."(2)

Similar to Mohegan Colony, the Modern School in North Stelton, New Jersey operated as the center of the Ferrer colony. By 1923, Kelly broke from the Stelton colony after becoming disillusioned with the "physical squalor" and general lack of civic improvements, where many residents still lived in tents and no road improvements had ever been made.(3) In 1923, Kelly had the opportunity to purchase 450 acres of land from the Baron de Hirsch Fund; he formed the Mohegan Colony Association to purchase the land, which was then distributed in one to three acre parcels to residents. The Mohegan Colony property contained a farmhouse, barn, and a well, and was situated in an aesthetically-pleasing environment with lakefront access to Mohegan Lake. By 1930, 300 families were settled in Mohegan Colony. Similarly to Stelton, many residents commuted to New York City, though they were generally middle-class and white-collar professionals, unlike Stelton residents who typically worked in the garment industry.

Fifteen acres of property were purchased by the Mohegan Modern School Association, which opened the school in 1924 under the leadership of Stelton veterans Jim and Nellie Dick. Many elements from the Stelton community carried over into Mohegan Colony, including the establishment of the Living House, where students who were sent to the school lived. Unlike Stelton, there were fixed conditions to membership in the Mohegan Colony, including the payment of monthly fees to the administration as membership dues and maintenance fees. Though many colonists in Mohegan had been former residents of Stelton, an increasingly-large number of residents were affiliated with the communist party, leading to deep divisions within the colony and its administration. From its initial founding, factional divisions could be seen as early as 1925. The Mohegan Modern School became the major source of dispute between the colony's anarchists and communists. The economic instability of the Depression, led to efforts to change the administration of the school increased throughout the 1930s, with a large number of colonists advocating for a progressive school that received government support, a notion that was antithetical to anarchist and Ferrer teachings. By the 1930s, the larger anarchist movement in the United States had declined, and many of the original anarchists in the colony had either left or were no longer committed to the philosophy. Due to the growing number of communists in the community, a large anti-communist faction developed out of the remaining anarchists, socialists, and liberals in order to prevent the communists from gaining control of the colony's administration. By the time Harry Kelly adopted the label "libertarian socialist,"(4) the founding principles were long gone and outsiders became the majority. In the spirit of the anarchist philosophy's emphasis on creativity, the Mohegan Colony administration frequently sponsored cultural events, including concerts and lectures. These events were not limited to adults, as three different children's theater groups operated within the colony from 1923 to 1949. One of these cultural events, a concert given by Paul Robeson in 1949 signaled the end of the original Mohegan Colony. Following this concert, local Ku Klux Klan members attacked communist attendants with rocks, and following this event, the Mohegan Colony Board of Trustees prevented communist members from assuming any official position in the colony.

A new beginning

The Mohegan Colony officially became the Mohegan Colony Association in 1952 with a certificate of incorporation and significant changes to its constitution. With the closing of the Mohegan Modern School in 1941, the purpose of the association began to change. Throughout the later half of the twentieth century until today, the main purpose of the association has been to maintain and provide access to beach and other property owned by Mohegan Colony, Inc. The administration of the association is the responsibility of eleven trustees, four officers (President, Vice-President, Treasurer, and Secretary), and various committees that varied throughout the years, but have included the camp committee, house/management committee, and nursery school committee.

Despite the loss of radicalism in the community's administration, the Mohegan Colony Association remained committed to cultural awareness and community. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, the Mohegan Colony Association was active in promoting cultural events and liberal ideals. Concerts, lectures, and dance performances were all sponsored by committees within the Mohegan Colony Association and frequently took place at the Martha Guinsberg Pavillion. Among these events were two events in 1964 that emphasize the community's cultural and political awareness: a Pete Seeger concert and a concert in support of the Mississippi Project and the civil rights movement.

Among the many efforts to improve the community and its shared property were the establishment of the Mohegan Nursery School in 1969, which opened in the school building that had once been the Mohegan Modern School, and several efforts to form special tax districts to finance the maintenance of the area's property. In 1970, the Mohegan Colony Association joined neighboring homeowner associations to form the Mohegan Lake Association and successfully lobbied for the development of a special taxation district that would be responsible for the protection and maintenance of the environmental stability of Mohegan Lake. Another special taxation district was proposed by the Mohegan Colony Association administration in 1972 and again in 1993 with the hope of establishing a park district that would encompass the area distinguished as Mohegan Colony. Faced with ever decreasing amounts of revenue, the administration developed these proposals as a way to maintain the upkeep of community property, which included the beach, a playground, tennis courts, and the Mohegan Nursery School. Both proposals were ultimately rejected, and several other initiatives have been raised to combat the decrease in voluntary participation.

Currently, the Mohegan Colony Association operates as a homeowner's association that actively recruits new members and requires that members participate and pay their dues in order to have access to community property. The Mohegan Colony Association also still emphasizes the promotion of cultural events, including the annual Mohegan Colony Association Storytelling and Music Festival.

(1) See Paul Avrich The Modern School Movement(Princeton, 1980), p. 7. (2) Laurence Veysey The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Communities in Twentieth Century America(Chicago, 1973), p. 107. (3) Veysey, 163 (4) Avrich, 335