The Best of the Faithist Journal - Kasandra Kares

make their home in El Paso, where Mr. I-lowland died in 1917, at the age of eighty three. Mrs. Howland died in 1922. Justine, using the pen name of Jane Howlind wrote for an El Paso newspaper. Now eighty, she is reported to be living in Los Angeles and is grandmother to eight or nine offspring of her three children. When Shalam was closed, Justine moved the body of her stepfather, Dr. Newbrough, from the plot on the colony grounds which had been used as a burial place, to the Masonic Cemetery in Las Cruces. In 1952, a group of Faithists placed a granite monument on the grave, honoring him. All that remains today are the children’s’ home, recently used to house farm laborers, and the schoolhouse which was remodeled for a barn. The bell from the Temple of Tae was donated to Our Lady of Purification Church in Dona Ana and now calls Catholics to worship.

Residents of Dona Ana recall that the Shalam grounds were used for concerts, dances and picnics for several years after the Howlands vacated the colony. Gradually, through disuse and vandalism, the buildings fell into ruins. Fire ravaged the beautiful Fraternum and it was razed about fifteen years ago. The original acreage of 1,200 shrank to 900 after floods from the Rio Grande in the early l900s washed away land along the shores.

The Howlands sold it in 1908 to an agricultural syndicate. Since then, the land has passed through a succession of owners, being gradually cut up into smaller farms. Now then, in deep plowing the fields, present day owners dig up pieces of the pipes that carried water from the Shalam reservoir to the buildings. With irrigation from Elephant Buttle Dam, the site of the unusual Shalam experiment now grows some of the finest cotton and alfalfa in the Mesilla Valley. Dr. Newbrough prophesied eighty years ago that it would someday blossom like the rose.” Shalam is a memory, but the Faithists live on among scattered groups in various parts of the world, in England, South Africa, Japan, and in numerous states in America. Faithists communicate with each other through a newsletter. They follow a vegetarian diet and the precepts of OAHSPE, knowing that someday their beliefs will he universally accepted, when “the existing religions of the world are but myths.’

There are two sorts of people in the world, who with equal degrees of health and wealth, become the one happy, and the other miserable. This Page 185 of 357