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Autograph Letter Signed. 1pg.+stamped address leaf. To J.[oseph] M.Bimeler, Zoar, Tusc.[arawas] Co[unty], Ohio.

Legal complaint from a judge at the County Seat about taxes on Zoar property, received by Bimeler, “father” of the Zoar Colony, three months before his death in August 1853, which marked the decline of the 35 year-old utopian society in which all private property had been abolished.

The Zoar communal “Society of Separatists” had been founded in 1817 by German immigrants, who, after suffering religious oppression in their homeland, had come to the US in 1817, led by the charismatic Bimeler. This letter gave foreboding warning of the troubles ahead, with many Zoarites increasingly unwilling to share their property communally, eventually leading to the dissolution of the colony forty years later.

Hance writes about the complaint of a man whose mother had withheld his name from the deed of a property because “you have had the land and they have been obliged to pay taxes, that they had paid on the whole tract and that you a few years ago paid them a portion and afterwards you neglected to pay…I know nothing of the truth of this statement. If it be true it will be better to pay them the taxes and then get it closed. I will endeavour to get another deed executed by all the parties living…”