Ohio History Journal

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The OHIO HISTORICAL Quarterly

The OHIO HISTORICAL Quarterly

VOLUME 70 ?? NUMBER 4 ?? OCTOBER 1961

 

 

From Free-Love to Catholicism:

Dr. and Mrs. Thomas L. Nichols

At Yellow Springs

 

By PHILIP GLEASON*

 

 

 

AS THE SLAVERY controversy grew more intense in the mid-

1850's, many of the reform movements which had preoccupied

large numbers of Americans in the previous decade were sub-

merged in the mainstream of the antislavery movement. Yet

currents of reform not connected with antislavery did persist;

and one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of

declining communitarian socialism took place in the small

southwestern Ohio town of Yellow Springs. Here a utopian

colony championing free-love was established in 1856; just

one year later it came to an abrupt end when its founders and

several inmates entered the Roman Catholic Church. The fact

that the famous educator Horace Mann was the most vehe-

ment critic of "Memnonia," as it was called, added to the

drama of the affair. The founders of Memnonia, Dr. Thomas

L. Nichols and his wife, Mary S. Gove Nichols, were also well

known in their own day, but have since been almost completely

forgotten.

Both Dr. and Mrs. Nichols were born in New Hampshire,

he in 1815, she in 1810; by the time they were married in

1848, they had dabbled in practically every reform and intel-

* Philip Gleason is a member of the department of history at the University of

Notre Dame.