Llewellyn Castle

In 1869 six London families arrived in Nemaha County, Kansas, as the first colonists of the Workingmen’s Cooperative Colony, later fancifully renamed Llewellyn Castle by a local writer. These early colonists were all members of Britain’s National Reform League, founded by noted Chartist leader James Bronterre O’Brien. As working-class radicals they were determined to find an alternative to the grinding poverty that exploitative liberal capitalism had inflicted on England’s laboring poor. Located on 680 acres in northeastern Kansas, this collectivist colony jointly owned all the land and its natural resources, with individuals leasing small sections to work. The money from these leases was intended for public works and the healthcare and education of colony members.The colony floundered after just a few years and collapsed in 1874, but its mission and founding ideas lived on in Kansas. Many former colonists became prominent political activists in the 1890s, and the colony’s ideals of national fiscal policy reform and state ownership of land were carried over into the Kansas Populist movement. Based on archival research throughout the United States and the United Kingdom, this history of an English collectivist colony in America’s Great Plains highlights the connections between British and American reform movements and their contexts.

"Llewellyn Castle is an accomplishment that contributes much to our understanding of a social reform movement that stretched from London to Kansas, while reminding us that even lost and forgotten "footnotes" can inform us about larger historical trends."—Charles Delgadillo, Kansas History, "Llewellyn Castle revives the history of a community and group. . . . It will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of scholars in a variety of fields."—Michelle D. Tiedje, Nebraska History, "Llewellyn Castle is a surprisingly epic history of the cooperative political and economic world view that spanned the nineteenth century and formed the bedrock of the Anglo-American radical tradition."—Adam-Max Tuchinsky, Journal of American History, “Llewellyn Castle will be quite important to specialists in regional history, British history, and communal studies. . . . [This is] scholarship at its finest.”—Timothy Miller, author of The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America, 1900–1960  , “Gary Entz’s discussion of the Populists’ subtreasury plan . . . represents an original and path-breaking analysis and [is] a real contribution to the historiography of American populism.”—Jim Bisset, author of Agrarian Socialism in America   

Gary R. Entz is a historian who previously taught at McPherson College in Kansas. He currently teaches at Nicolet College in Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Mormon History and Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Great Plains and in edited volumes.