A French utopian silk colony on the prairie, praised in 1876
A Frenchman named Ernest de Boissière founded a colony out here in the late 1800s on Fourierist lines, where what a settler was paid depended on what that settler could produce, and what they produced was silk. It was good silk, too: it drew praise at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. But settlers drifted away and the silk proved hard to sell, and the settlement folded. A few buildings still stand, about two miles southwest of Williamsburg where US 50 meets Arkansas Road.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours of here.
