More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 18 - March 20, 2021
No one knows exactly how many libertarians moved to Grafton for the Free Town Project. Census records show that the town’s population swelled by more than two hundred between 2000 and 2010, but there could have been fewer libertarian colonists than that, or there could have been more.
The Free Town Project took on a distinctly masculine feel. Although the movement included some families, they were mostly individuals, and mostly men. The United States, New Hampshire, and Grafton County all have majority-female populations, but by 2009 the town of Grafton had 608 men and 488 women, giving it one of the highest male-to-female ratios in the state.
The town was home to only 39 women in their twenties, as compared to 105 men. Many of the men went by colorful nicknames or simple surnames, like Redman, Chan, the Mad Russian, and the copiously bearded Richard Angell, a libertarian anti-circumcision activist whose favored moniker was, at one time, “Dick Angel.”
The difference in caliber refers to the diameter of the projectile—the .357 was part of a Prohibition-era generation of bullets designed to penetrate the car doors of bootlegging gangsters, while the wider .410 (which slots comfortably into a shotgun) gained fame among firearm enthusiasts as the bullet of choice of Floridian judges, who wanted to be able to gun down raging criminals in their courtrooms.
“I personally, as a big fan of Native American studies, a little Native American blood in me and everything else, I’d like to get to that level,” he says.
"I'm 1/64th Apache and don't mind the name."
Adam’s commitment to survivalism flows naturally from his other beliefs, one of which he shares with leaders of the Unification Church—that society will soon crumble, not just in Grafton, but everywhere. Adam estimates that, for the general population, panic will set in four days after the grocery stores run out of food.
Adam is emphatically not a libertarian. And though he uses political labels all the time, he’s uncomfortable with being boxed in by any label himself. Don’t call him a liberal. American liberals are “too far—way too far—to the right for me.”
Grafton’s emphasis on freedom creates a space, Adam says, that lets the extreme left and the extreme right collaborate on the dismantling of societal norms, with minimal interference from authorities.
Despite their differences over the free market, Adam and the libertarians do agree on some issues, including vigorous defense of the right to bear arms. This is, in fact, a point of agreement for a broad swath of New Hampshirites,
In 2012, in a change that cannot be positively associated with New Hampshire’s libertarians, the state attained the highest per-capita rate of machine-gun ownership in the nation. Federal data indicated the presence in the state of nearly ten thousand registered weapons, which meant that if you were in a fully packed three-hundred-seat New Hampshire movie theater watching the latest Death Wish revival, there were, statistically speaking, two registered machine-gun owners sitting beside you in the darkness, drinking it all in and getting—if Bruce Willis did his job well—really into the idea of
...more
Free Towners began to show up “with a gun under each arm,” as one resident told me, at the general store and at the town transfer station (where residents bring their trash, because town taxes do not fund a municipal pickup service).
Franz believes that people who openly carry their guns undercut the very rights they’re trying to protect.
You think you’re a fucking cowboy who likes to walk around with a gun on his hip because it makes you feel like you’ve got a big dick. No. No. Put that under your fucking jacket. If you really feel you need one, put it under your fucking jacket like a normal human being. Respect other people’s sensibilities.”
I mean point.
He began to think of the twenty-nine-acre farm as a goat sanctuary, one that would run in accordance with his Buddhist beliefs. He started taking in stray Nubians and Cashmeres; because he thought it inhumane to isolate, castrate, or slaughter his bleating wards, they were free to breed with one another, a freedom of which the goats took full advantage.
Yup that tracks
It was as if some elder Cthulu god had been handed a wooden, barn-sized bowl of sacrificial chevre and cast it down, disgusted at the enormous mass of shit and dead goats mixed in with the living. When she later described the number of goat corpses she’d seen, Doughnut Lady was characteristically diplomatic. “He was trying, you know,” she said kindly. “He had a problem.”
Police, following a trail of dead goats that spanned four states, finally caught up with Goat Man in West Virginia. When he was arrested, he had sixteen goats in his possession (including one in the freezer).
In Grafton, some residents work hard to discourage bears from entering their property by getting fierce dogs and putting up electric fences. Burrington, who kept up her mother’s sheep farming tradition, used a tractor to bury her dead animals deep in the ground. When the ground froze and she could no longer dig such graves, she drove the carcasses up an old county road to dump them around the back side of a rugged outcropping known as Aaron’s Ledge, where the bears were thick as trees.
But their educational efforts were spurned by a stubborn rearguard of civic-minded residents who seemed to feel that the Free Towners themselves were the main obstacle to left-aloneness.
“The libertarian movement is more cerebral, if you will,” he said. “They lack the ability to deal with people at the human level.”
Or you're fucking selfish children.
One elderly Graftonite posted the ultimate do-it-yourself dentistry video: while friends laughed raucously, he used a pair of pliers to wrench out one of his teeth (or, put another way, half of his teeth).
At Grafton’s annual town meetings, the libertarians floated all sorts of new ideas, hoping to find common ground with longtime residents. They were stymied in their efforts to withdraw Grafton from the regional school district, explicitly condemn The Communist Manifesto, and eliminate funding for the Grafton Public Library. They were successful, however, in getting a measure passed to cut 30 percent from the town’s $1 million budget, as well as another to deny funding to the county senior citizens’ council.
Thus, residents eventually voted on whether to protect the town citizenry “from taxation without representation, by forbidding the implementation within the town limits of any tax, levy, fee, assessment, surcharge, or any other financial imposition by Sponge Bob Square Pants.”
Pendarvis advocated loudly for the rights of women, though he never seemed to get beyond a very narrow zone of empowerment that largely concerned itself with the right to go without bras and underwear and the right to sell sex. After being ousted from the Free Town Project, Pendarvis used eBay to sell a Floridian island that he had acquired under questionable circumstances.
Meanwhile, Mike Lorrey’s participation in the Free Town Project took a backseat to a new venture—buying and selling real estate in the virtual reality “Second Life,” where, he claimed, he parlayed a $200 investment up to $250,000 in annual real-dollar revenues. But when Lorrey clashed with Linden Labs, the company that owns the Second Life platform, his account was eventually suspended and all of his “virtual real estate” was seized.
For example, Free Towner Bill Walker, known in internet freedom forums by the user name “topgunner,” was driving his Mazda pickup truck down the streets of Manchester early one morning in October 2008 when a policeman pulled him over for a loud muffler. During the stop, the officer discovered that Walker had two loaded pistols and numerous magazines of ammo in his waistband and was also wearing body armor.
Ankrom argued her traffic violations all the way to the state Supreme Court, in part on the legal theory that state requirements for a driver’s license unconstitutionally restricted her right to travel. She lost.
In 2006, Babiarz sued the town of Grafton for a procedural issue related to libertarian efforts to get elected to the planning board. He lost.
Only when I eased my car up that slope with the help of a rocky, corrugated dirt driveway could I see the hidden world of campers, Airstream trailers, and broken-down recreational vehicles that served as homes for the people—mostly men, all seemingly armed—who lived there.
I’d been told that, in addition to the camp, the woods in this region provided cover to modern-day bootleggers, who were growing marijuana and cooking meth with relative temerity, knowing that the citizenry would react negatively to aggressive enforcement by the town’s sole full-time police officer.
“I got a crow story for you,” said Redman in a throaty drawl. “The day before yesterday, I saw one flying right past here. Upside down! Having a ball. It was cawing and it was flying upside down. Just for the fun of flying.… I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of birds. I never saw one flying upside down so joyfully before.”
As libertarians across the country pulled up stakes and headed to Grafton, the first pressing need they faced was often housing. Some had the means to purchase homes, but many, lacking such resources, turned to the chain of such camps emerging in the wilderness. They built homes out of yurts and RVs, trailers and tents, geodesic domes and shipping containers.
The complete lack of zoning regulations, code enforcement, or building codes eliminated any burdens associated with demonstrating that their new homes were habitable and free of fire hazards, and so these ad-hoc solutions functioned as a sort of ultimate free market, where men floated freely between the camps in pursuit of what they valued most at the moment—a heated camper, a solitary yurt, better roommates—cross-pollinating friendships and political ideas along the way.
From their perspective, a checkerboard of smorgasbords was suddenly springing up in their woodland territories, each camp burgeoning with calories. Through trial and error, the problem-solving bears quickly learned that their new neighbors were loath to call state wildlife authorities to report bear incursions.
The beams alone—massive timbers hewn from old-growth American chestnuts that have all but disappeared from the Grafton-area landscape—were worth a fortune, but no one would dream of selling them. Over the course of a century, prayerful Graftonites had hallowed the wood—swelling it with baptismal holy water, inundating it with the molten-golden notes of matrimony, burnishing it with anointing oil, and bowing it down with the somber weight of a thousand caskets. If people driving through Grafton on Route 4 notice the town at all, it is because of this surviving nod to cozy Yankee traditionalism,
...more
John Connell, a factory worker from Massachusetts unknown to almost everyone in town, had purchased the Grafton Center Church. And now, this selectman was here. Under the veneer of welcoming Connell to the community, he was feeling Connell out about the church’s future. They engaged in a bare minimum of small talk before the selectman got to the point.
That town leaders had concerns about Connell’s intentions contained a great irony in that, had they been a bit more open-pocketed, the historic meeting place would have never been vulnerable to a purchase for a pittance by an outsider.
The reason for its predicament dates back to the unique circumstances of the church’s construction in 1796, when Grafton voters—always eager for an avoid-tax-quick scheme—declined to finance the construction of a town meetinghouse. Instead, they agreed to buy a few pews in the planned church, which not only helped the congregation build its church but also gave the town partial ownership of the structure.
When the building was in need of repairs, Grafton taxpayers were reminded that they enjoyed using the space much more than they enjoyed paying for the space. In 1856, to resolve questions of responsibility for repair costs and avoid unnecessary commingling of church and state, the town and congregation agreed to split the building into two parts—like a sitcom scene in which disputed room ownership is delineated with a strip of masking tape. But over time even that level of financial responsibility seemed too much for town taxpayers.
With the town relegated to mere tenant status, the building fell wholly under the control of a dwindling population of faithful churchgoers. In the years after the Free Town Project was announced, the Grafton Center Congregational Church, which had owned the property for decades, called it quits and moved elsewhere (to the Danbury town line, under a new name).
For many, hopping on the chance to buy and control the fate of the property (which Grafton historian Ken Cushing called “the soul of the town”) was a no-brainer. But spending tax funds on a suspiciously sentimental concept like protecting “the character” of the town was opposed by a burgeoning population of libertarians.
Remarkably, the church leadership responded to the rejection with an even more generous offer. They asked if the town wanted the property for free. Even more remarkably, the town said no.
Without spending money on a formal assessment, there was no real way to tell. Rumors that the church was structurally unsound circulated through town, said Deb Clough, the town librarian. “That led the selectmen to say, ‘It’s another money pit,’” said Clough. And so the church put the now-vacant building on the open market.
Dolts
Connell was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1960. For nearly three decades, beginning when he graduated from high school in 1978, he worked twelve-hour shifts at Stahl Chemical, a leather treatment factory situated between a tavern and an auto body shop in Peabody.
Connell wasn’t interested in curing his ailments through conventional medicine, which he referred to as “the medical-industrial path,” and he also declined to sue the company. That wasn’t his style. “I had been paid for my work,” he said. “I had taken risks.” Connell may have been unsure about his health when he left the factory, but he knew for certain that he wanted to get away from the stultifying grind of Peabody.
Without involving any lawyers or banks, Connell made a cash offer of $57,500. That represented most of his 401(k), and he had no idea what he was going to do with the building if the sale went through. The voice inside him was reassuring. Don’t be afraid, it said to him.
The former Grafton Center Church, he announced, would remain a church, with regular services taking place behind its handcrafted wooden doors. The property would also serve as a showcase for his artistic and spiritual expression. Though he had no formal training, he, John Connell, would live inside the church as its sexton and pastor. And, he vowed, he would not pay taxes. No matter what.
Louis was more properly known as Louis Banks, and more properly yet known as the Reverend Louis Albert Banks, Doctor of Divinity, a celebrated Methodist who, at age forty-seven, had already churned through a series of life adventures that included entering college at age eleven, being shot in Seattle while fighting on behalf of the Chinese during the anti-Chinese riots, chastising saloon-keepers and sweatshop owners for their respective roles in oppressing the poor, and running a distant third in the 1893 race for governor of Massachusetts.
Between 1786 and 1800, Grafton’s population doubled from 354 to 682. By 1860, it had nearly doubled again, to 1,259, and there were now 190 working farms of various sizes and agricultural pursuits laid out beneath Banks, many using freight trains on the newly built Northern Rail to ship tons of wool, potatoes, firewood, maple sugar, and dairy products to market at a tidy profit.
During this heyday, Grafton boasted of three post offices, eleven schoolhouses, a creamery, fourteen mines, and fifteen mills churning out processed forms of everything from grain to clothing. (The largest, a sawmill, could produce more than a million feet of lumber per year.)
In early 1902, they erected the scaffolding of a steel tower. It was magnificent—stretching forty feet above the highest point of the Pinnacle, with a runged ladder going up the side. At the top perched a small, round platform built of wood, ten feet in diameter, like a plated offering to God himself.
