Gaston Ernest Berry
Gaston Ernest Berry was a prominent figure in the establishment of the Fairhope single-tax colony in Alabama, where he served as the principal architect and a key leader for over forty years. Born in Henderson, Illinois, in the 1860s, he was educated at Drake University and became involved in various social and political movements. His vision for Fairhope was heavily influenced by Henry George's philosophy, advocating for a single tax on land values to create a more equitable society. Under his leadership, Fairhope emerged as a thriving community dedicated to cooperative individualism, which allowed private ownership of property while promoting collective decision-making regarding land rents.
Berry's efforts established Fairhope as one of the longest-lasting experimental communities in the United States, noted for its progressive education initiatives and a unique cultural atmosphere that attracted reformers, artists, and creative individuals. Throughout his life, he was admired for his commitment to principles and his ability to translate theories into practical applications. Despite the success of Fairhope as a demonstration of his ideas, he faced challenges in spreading the single tax philosophy beyond the community. Gaston Ernest Berry passed away in 1937, leaving behind a legacy that continues to influence Fairhope’s identity and governance structure today. The Fairhope Single Tax Corporation archives contain extensive resources for those interested in his life and the colony's history.
Subject Terms
Gaston Ernest Berry
- Ernest Berry Gaston
- Born: November 21, 1861
- Died: December 21, 1937
Was the principal architect and founder of the Fairhope, Alabama, single-tax colony. For over forty years, as colony secretary and editor of the community newspaper, he was Fairhope’s major leader and spokesman—a record unequaled in the history of American communitarianism. Fairhope is significant as the first and largest colony based on Henry George’s single-tax philosophy and as one of the longest-lasting experimental communities.
Born in Henderson, Illinois, Gaston was the youngest of four children of James Estep Gaston and Catherine Estep (Atkinson) Gaston. Each had previously married, reared a family, and been widowed. James Gaston, a descendant of French Huguenots whose great-great-grandfather came to America in the early eighteenth century, moved to Des Moines, Iowa, in 1864 as pastor of the First Christian Church. Ernest Gaston grew up in Des Moines, attended its public schools, and graduated with class honors in commerce from Drake University in 1886. On November 24, 1887, he married fellow Drake student Clara Leah Mershon (1864-1934), of Fairview, Iowa. They had five children: Frances Lily (born in 1889); James Ernest (1890); Cornelius Alonzo (1891); Leah Catherine (1894): and Arthur Fairhope (1896).
Editor of a newspaper in University Place, a Des Moines suburb, and active in local politics and building construction, E. B. Gaston was alarmed by the poverty, industrial violence, class conflict, and political turmoil that appeared to him to be the inevitable results of rampant individualism and industrial progress. In 1890 he spearheaded an effort to establish a cooperative colony based partly on the ideas of Edward Bellamy. The plan failed and Gaston shifted his reform energies to the Populist movement, serving as an editor of General James B. Weaver’s Farmers’ Tribune and as an officer of the state party. Discouraged by poor results at the polls, he turned again to communitarianism, to design a self-contained, alternative society that would provide the leverage for change politics denied him.
The resulting Fairhope plan differed both from Gaston’s earlier socialist model and from other contemporary colony schemes. Emphasizing what he called “cooperative individualism,” he made Henry George’s philosophy the centerpiece of his design. George believed that poverty would be eliminated, the economy more stable, and society more harmonious if government did not confiscate the earnings of labor and capital but, instead, collected for the benefit of all people those values created by the community. Land values, according to George, were community-created values; all revenue therefore should come from a single tax on land values.
Adapting George’s theory to the Fairhope community, Gaston provided that all property except land and public utilities remain in private hands. He hoped that communal decisions concerning the setting and spending of land rents, along with complete democracy in colony government, would lead to cooperative ventures and attitudes without curbing individual initiative.
In November 1894, Gaston led a small group to the colony site, a beautiful plot on a bluff overlooking Mobile Bay. Only twenty-eight persons, eight of whom were children, were in the founding party. Before the first year was out, the colony was rocked by a power struggle, but Gaston’s leadership was strengthened, new members were recruited, more land was acquired, and steady growth characterized the flourishing experiment. There were one hundred Fairhope residents in 1900; 850 by 1920; and about 1,800 when he died in 1937.
Gaston’s unrivaled leadership over four decades has been variously explained. His occasional detractors stressed his political shrewdness, but most shared the judgment of Joseph Fels (a wealthy Philadelphia soap manufacturer, single-tax philanthropist, and Fairhope’s principal benefactor) that Gaston’s “rare ability and unselfish character” accounted for his esteem and the colony’s steady growth. A long-time associate recalls that more than anyone else he had ever known, Gaston “had the capacity to work for a principle.” A Mobile lawyer was drawn to his “honest and earnest” commitment to a cause he knew could not triumph in his own lifetime. Another contemporary believed it was the commitment to principle along with the ability to articulate it eloquently and apply it practically that accounted for Gaston’s enduring role in the community.
“Abstractions attract the attention of relatively few,” Gaston once wrote. “Definite, concrete illustrations of results appeal to almost every-one.” In the history of reform, he believed, “those who make good theories work and prove the value of proposed social solutions by practical demonstration will do far more to move the world than the wisest and most brilliant theorists.” He soon came to look on Fairhope as a place where “good theories work.” As a laboratory of social theories, Fairhope tested not only the single-tax doctrine but progressive education theories in the School of Organic Education, founded by Marietta Johnson in 1907. Fairhope also became a winter haven for Northerners and a magnet for a modest number of reformers, authors, artists, and craftsmen who gave the community a special ferment and creative ambience.
With no geographic or economic advantages, Fairhope soon outstripped older, neighboring settlements. Gaston attributed both the material progress and the sense of community to the application of the “good theories” on which Fair-hope had been founded. In this sense he regarded the experiment as a success. However, he became aware that such a successful demonstration had converted neither his county nor his state to the single tax and he died with private fears about the future of the community itself. Fairhope retains the single tax plan to this day. Gaston died at seventy-six in Mobile.
Several boxes of E. B. Gaston’s correspondence and a complete file of the Fairhope Courier are in the archives of the Fairhope Single Tax Corporation and are the best sources for a study of his life. The colony archives also include minutes, pamphlets, financial records, articles about Fair-hope, photographs, and memorabilia. Fairhope and Gaston’s role in it are discussed in P. E. Alyea and B. R. Alyea, Fairhope, 1894-1954: The Story of a Single Tax Colony (1956); A. N. Young, The Single Tax Movement in the United States (1916); A. P. Dudden, Joseph Fels and the Single Tax Movement: (1971); and P. M. Gaston, Women of Fair Hope (1984).