"And Be Ye Separate": The Lopez Island Colony of Thomas Gourley

In the spring of 1911 one hundred fifty religious fundamentalists debarked on Lopez Island in northwestern Washington state.Led by Thomas W. Gourley, the band came to create a strict religious community apart from the fleshpots and temptations of society.Gourley first gathered his flock into a beach colony on the outskirts of Seattle.From Scripture he combined several verses to find his theme: "Come out from among the many and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and see if I will not pour you out a blessing that there will not be room enough to contain you."The believers led a frugal life on a meager diet with religious beliefs enforced by harsh necessity.Work did leave time for such activities as music groups and singing, and the people of the Colony experienced a spirit of good will and deep concern for one another.The bonds holding the colony together began to weaken during World War One when Gourley implored his young men to shun the draft, and he himself was arrested for making statements against the war.Some became disenchanted with the cloistered colony life.After Gourley departed during Christmas week in 1920 to become an evangelist and died in a Georgia train wreck -the community could no longer endure.The little known Gourley community presents in microcosm yet another illustration of the grand intentions, ordeals and frustrations that such groups so often encountered throughout the history of American communal movements.In the farthest northwest corner of the forty-eight states -so near the Canadian border that American and British troops threatened blows over their possessions in the middle nineteenth century -rest the San Juan Islands.The first European to enter their waters called them "an indescribable archipelago of islands, kelp, rocks, and big and little inlets," 1 and visitors have extolled their beauty with their travel