New Leaf Mills: A Chronicle (1913)

AUTHOR: Howells, William Dean

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

New Leaf Mills draws on Howells' youthful experience with his family at the utopian commune of Eureka Mills, Ohio. In the novel, the main characters, Owen Powell and his wife Ann, are Owenites and  Swedenborgians (26-27, 154). Owen is opposed to the Mexican War (43, 59), “peon” labor (43), and slavery, which he thinks an “abhorrence” (1, 52, 60, 72, 154), though he is not an Abolitionist (72). The first paragraph of the novel introduces him as “[a] man who condemned the recent war upon Mexico as a wicked crusade for the extension of slavery, and denounced the newly enacted Fugitive Slave Law as infernal” (1). Later, he actively aids in “the escape of fugitive slaves from Kentucky, whom he enjoyed hiding in the basement of his store, till he could forward them to some other underground station” (154).

Abandoning their unsuccessful city life, the Powells plan “a semi-communal settlement at New Leaf” (142), intending to “give all hands a share in the profits” of the newly established business, the titular New Leaf Mills (4). While all characters regularly hunt and eat meat (e.g., 5, 10, 53), Owen is certainly concerned about the well-being of his domestic animals, to the point that he considers becoming a vegetarian whenever some of them are about to be slaughtered:

Powell was out looking after the pigs and hens; he had almost a personal understanding with the pigs in their wildness among the fallen leaves on the hillside, and with the chickens in their home-loving tameness about the back yard; his familiarity always made it difficult to part with them for the ends that pork and poultry seem appointed to in the order of Providence; at such moments he owned that he was inclined to a vegetable diet (140-141).

The milling business falters and the Powells decide to return to the city in order to take over the New Church bookshop, with the hopes “that something in the nature of a New Church periodical might succeed in connection with the book-store” (153). At the end of the novel Owen concludes that “the communistic form” might be “defective” given that the “communities of Robert Owen had everywhere failed as signally as that of New Leaf Mills” (154). Yet he retains his conviction that “if some such conception of society could possess the entire State, a higher type of civilization would undoubtedly eventuate” (154).