Casey Edwards visits Arden, Delaware
Our village (or is it three?) was found by Casey Edwards in May, 2010 while bicycling from one utopian community to another, most of them defunct, but not ours! Below is what he had to say about his visit on his blog.
There’s no way I can do Arden justice here. It was like a little slice of magic in the Delaware woods.
I was interested in Arden because it had been cofounded (in 1900) by Will Price, an architect and proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement. And it had been founded on the single-tax principles of a late 19th-century economist named Henry George, who believed that no one should be able to own the land, and that a tax paid on land should be the only tax collected. (It’s so much more complicated than this, and even after speaking with a man named Mike Curtis, who’s an expert on these things, I still have only a very vague idea of George’s principles.)
Will Price and a sculptor named Frank Stephens found some farmland, and now on this land is an amazing hodge-podge of homes amid the trees, beautiful walking paths through the woods, a building called the Gild Hall that had been the property's original barn that’s now used for concerts and community meals, a separate community center housed in the old elementary school, a swimming pool, and an outdoor theater where the Shakespeare Gild puts on a play every summer (this summer it’s "As You Like It").
Two other communities have been founded adjacent to the original Arden — Ardentown (1922) and Ardencroft (1950) — similar in spirit but slightly different in organization.
I rode up to the Gild Hall on the afternoon of May 13, 2010, and it was just my [good] luck that the first person I encountered, Cecilia Vore, had once been a bike tourist and was widely involved in the community life of Arden. She helped make the next couple of days a whirlwind of activity: she found a place for me to have dinner that night (thanks, Amy and Bob!), helped me get into the museum the next day on a day it’s normally shut, introduced me to people and put me up at her and her husband Carl’s lovely craftsman home.
The motto of Arden is “You Are Welcome Hither,” and I felt beyond welcomed. It’s a beautiful place with a community of beautiful people.