History Commons^™

The Key Peninsula is home to the village of Home, which has a rich history of the progressive culture that's predominant in Western Washington today. On this special edition of Northwest Now, we travel to Home which was once a turn of the century anarchist colony. We'll hear from Justin Wadland author of the book "Trying Home" which depicts Home's interesting and colorful past.

Trying Home traces the history of the anarchist colony of Home, Washington, from its founding in 1896 on a remote Puget Sound peninsula to its dissolution amid bitter infighting in 1921.

As a practical experiment in anarchism, Home offered its participants a rare degree of freedom and tolerance in the Gilded Age, but the community also became notorious to the outside world for its open rejection of contemporary values. Using a series of linked narratives, Trying Home reveals the stories of the iconoclastic individuals who lived in …

"Climatologists drill core samples from rock, soil, and ice, seeking evidence of the most fleeting of natural phenomena: ancient weather. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that each of the four sections in Forrest Gander’s Core Samples from the World opens with a poem titled “Evaporation” that simultaneously orients and disorients the reader to what follows." -- From the opening paragraph.