The Best of the Faithist Journal - Kasandra Kares

Shalam’s success. Howland build a huge reservoir and irrigation system, powered by eight windmills. ted more orchards and gardens, imported a purebred dairy herd from Wisconsin, and bought a flock of several thousand chickens, he sold butter, eggs, and milk (pasteurized in Shalam’s own plant) in the neighboring cities of Las Cruces and El Paso. When he found that laborers were being charged high prices for commodities, he put in a community store where food and clothing were sold at cost. For families who wanted to live together, he built an adobe village, which he called Levitica, allotting, with each house, land for cultivation.

Levitica was one of Howland’s first mistakes. The colonist quarreled and refused to help themselves. They let 1,000 chickens freeze in one night.

Some of the livestock were stolen. Precious water leaked out of cracks in the wooden irrigation ditches. Orchards and gardens withered and died from lack of water and care. Howland eventually sent them away with prepaid railroad fares and spending money. Before long, the school had to be dosed for lack of help; and the children, sent to public schools, enjoyed the freer life of the outside world. A couple of the older girls eloped. Other youngsters rebelled against the yard work and strange rites of the colony in 1901, after arranging for the legal return of the property to himself, Howland placed twenty one of the twenty five children under fourteen years of age then at Shalam, in orphanages and private homes. Booker T Washington is said to have taken one bright Negro boy. Howland peddled dairy products, vegetable foods, cookies and potato chips in Las Cruces to keep the home going for the four remaining children. On November 30, 1907, he gave up, locked the doors of Shalam, and moved away. There was a woman behind the Shalam colony too. Mrs. Frances Vand de Water Sweet, a young divorcee, came with the founding group in 1884, bringing with her an eight months old daughter, Justine. She married Dr. Newbrough in Faithist rites, September 28, 1887, and then married Andrew Howland, June 25, 1893, after Valley residents had spread much gossip about “free love” in the colony. She was the one constant influence in the colony and is known as the “Mother of Shalam.” The Shalam lands were sold in 1908 for $60,000.

The Howlands went to California for a couple of years but returned to Page 184 of 357