Arthur Morgan and Community

Trinica Sampson, Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions | April 22, 2013

Although I am still only in my first year at Antioch College, I have heard the word “community” more in the past seven months than I ever had prior to coming to the college. The idea of a small, tight-knit community standing together to change the world forms the building blocks of Antioch’s spirit. “Learning to live and work productively in the community, and to participate in governance,” the college’s website asserts, “will remain among the most important skills students will acquire in their learning and living within the community on and off campus.” It was Arthur E. Morgan who, during his presidency of the college from 1921 to 1936, invented the cooperative education program that upholds and develops the college’s value of community so valiantly. How fitting it is that I am completing my first cooperative job experience as an intern at Community Solutions with Faith Morgan, Arthur Morgan’s granddaughter!

On Wednesday, Faith offered Julia and I the opportunity to attend the Miami Conservancy District’s centennial event commemorating the devastating Great Dayton Flood of 1913. After several mishaps with a GPS that insisted the event was being held in a run-down abandoned lot, we made it to the correct address. Within minutes of us rushing inside, Faith was ushered to the front of the room, where she was a part of an impromptu interview about Arthur Morgan, who was asked to direct the Miami River Flood Control Project in 1913 and became the design engineer for the Miami Conservancy District flood control system as a result.

Through the interview, Faith gave us a glimpse into her grandfather’s life. Born near Cincinnati in 1878, Arthur Morgan showed a love of the outdoors from an early age. He often took long walks outside, collecting lichen samples, reflecting on what would later become his idea of the ideal community, and exploring the myriad wonders of the outdoors. This passion of his did not disappear when he grew older, but he turned his attentions to engineering at the age of twenty-two, apprenticing with his father to learn the skills of the trade. At thirty-two, Morgan founded his own engineering company and was eventually asked to work on flood control during the 1913 flood, thereby launching his name into the world of engineering. Although he had completed only a few years of college, Morgan became adept at the craft of engineering through his work with his father and his own self-taught studies, inadvertently living out aspects of what would later become the work-study program he implemented at Antioch College. 

Morgan joined the Board of Antioch College in 1919, using his proximity to the dying institution as an occasion to employ his educational aspirations toward the rebuilding of the college. He and his wife, Lucy Morgan, shared the dream of starting a school, and with the financially compromised Antioch College, they were able to fulfill their dream and recreate Antioch into the school that it is today. As an advocate for experiential learning, Morgan introduced not only the work-study  and the engineering program to the school, but also the idea that students should be well-rounded individuals with education in several subjects in order to better humanity. 

Morgan was also able to apply his concept of an ideal community in 1930, when he and his son founded an experimental, non-sectarian community that was known as the Celo Intentional Community. Located on 1,000 acres of land in the Black Mountains of Western North Carolina, the community is still thriving today and includes a school, health center, and summer camp.

In 1933, Morgan was asked by President Roosevelt to become the Chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority development project, which he ran successfully for six years. After returning to Yellow Springs in 1939, Morgan turned his attention to America’s small communities, developing ideas he had cultivated through building small model towns in Ohio and Tennessee. He founded Community Service, Inc. (now Community Solutions) in 1940 and was instrumental in turning Yellow Springs into the type of ideal community that he had dreamed about for years, a place in which people wanted to live, grow, and help each other as well as the world.

Faith had a captive audience throughout her interview, and received several questions from the Miami Conservancy District members after the prepared interview questions had been exhausted. Some questions dealt with Morgan’s professional life—his apprenticeship with his father, his work with Antioch, and his relationship with members of the Tennessee Valley Authority, among other topics. Surprisingly, there were many questions that expressed an interest in Morgan’s personal life as well. Faith was asked questions about where her grandfather lived, the type of relationship she had with him, and his interests growing up. There was a burst of appreciative chuckles after Faith recounted an anecdote in which a nineteen-year-old Arthur Morgan filled a cart with books, hoping to travel town-to-town and sell them— as Faith recalls, “He didn’t sell any books, but he read all of them.” If anything is an indication of his role in shaping communities, it is this: these people wanted to know more than just Arthur Morgan, successful engineer and college president. They wanted to know Arthur Morgan, the human being. 

After the event was finished and Faith had returned to her chair, she was approached by a crowd of people, each of them waiting in turn to meet her, ask more questions about her grandfather, and, in one case, even take a picture with her. She was, by dint of her relationship to the great Arthur Morgan, transformed into a celebrity of sorts. Morgan is the link between many people; in the true spirit of the ideas he valued so strongly, Morgan created a community of people who may otherwise never have come together, a community united by their ideals, goals, and the common factor among them—Arthur Morgan. He left a legacy behind him, and as one man who approached Faith after her interview fervently said, “He really was an inspiration." 

In an address made to the Community Church of New York in 1975, Morgan said, “If men and women of character and purpose come to see the significance of the present situation, they can make our small communities such live, interesting, adequate places to live in that young people of quality will prefer to stay.” Today, you can still sense the influence of Morgan’s touch in the strong sense of community in Yellow Springs and at Antioch College, or in the dams that continue to protect the Miami Valley, or in the work we do here at Community Solutions toward a sustainable future. We men and women of purpose have seen the significance and the gravity of the present situation in our world, and we are working to maintain and expand Arthur Morgan’s vision for communities that can stand as an example for what the rest of the world can and should aspire to be.