A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

They’d built a town with few taxes and little state involvement, where a man was free to build an epic, towering pulpit that, once scaled, rendered one nearly inaudible.

In the early days, the hands on the clock of enlightenment busily swept away Grafton’s wolves and bears and trees in favor of houses and farms and sheep. But when its capitalistic motor was stilled, that clock began rusting away, a slow fade of civilization punctuated by fire and flood. Between 1935 and 2002, the county lost 92 percent of its farmland, and fields reverted to impenetrable thickets of bramble, then tangles of young trees. Roads once supported by tax dollars became blackberry patches favored by foraging bears. The most heavily farmed region in the state became the most heavily forested.

The wilderness’s encroachment is presaged by advance troops of mice building nests in homes and under the hoods of cars. Left unchallenged, the vermin unpave the way for further intrusions by larger animals, water, wind, and vegetation. The state now considers Grafton a single, near-continuous block of bear habitat.

only granite steps and cellar holes marked the sites of buildings that had either burned in the fires caused by the charcoal kiln explosion

I'm sorry the what.

In most places, the further back in history one goes, the murkier and more mysterious a forest’s denizens become, and indeed, Grafton’s earliest European settlers suffocated beneath a dangerously heavy mythos of demons, devils, witches, and vampires.

In 1890, a wealthy and eccentric land speculator named Austin Corbin built a visionary game preserve just twenty miles from Grafton. Corbin Park was surrounded by thirty miles of heavily stockaded fence designed to prevent the escape of imported species, which included bighorn sheep, Russian wild boar, elk, and what became the largest herd of bison in the world. But with Jurassic Park–like flair, the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 breached Corbin Park’s stockade fence. Hundreds of animals escaped into the timberland, and some established breeding populations. Even today there are documented reports of wooly, tusked boars that can weigh up to 700 pounds.

In addition to the formidable creatures for which there is ample scientific evidence, undocumented megafauna, several people in Grafton believe, roam the woods. A man told me that more than once he’d seen dragonflies as big as hawks. In this area known by cryptozoologists as a Bigfoot environ (and one only fifty miles from the most famous UFO abduction account in American history, reported by Betty and Barney Hill in 1961), another man said he’d seen footprints of a bird with feet much larger than a human hand.

The llama thought that he himself was a five-foot-nine, four-hundred-pound monster of a sheep. And because he was the biggest, toughest animal on the ranch, he played deputy to Burrington’s sheriff.

Hurricane was now so close to the bear, actually nipping at its rounded ass, that the bear, once it reached the barrier, would have little option but to turn and defend itself by killing the llama.

Hurricane exploded at the bear, a spinning, category 5 blur of lashing hooves and biting teeth. The llama’s blows mostly landed on the bear’s throat, chest, and head. Meanwhile, the bear snarled and snapped ineffectively, seemingly unable to lay a claw on Hurricane.

For Grafton’s Free Towners, Rand’s vision of a market-driven society was what kept them privatizing and deregulating everything they could. For seven long years, they joined thrift-minded allies in issuing vociferous challenges to every rule and tax dollar in sight; one by one, expenditures were flayed from the municipal budget, bits of services peeled away like so much flesh.

They permanently extinguished most of the town’s streetlights to save on electricity bills and discontinued long stretches of dirt road to save on highway materials and equipment.

And though the planning board survived, Free Towners and other like-minded residents gutted its $2,000 budget, first cutting it to $500, then to a token $50. Contrary to the libertarians’ expectations, however, real life in the Free Town seemed to be almost the reverse of Rand’s fictional vision—by 2011, while the rest of America was chugging along unperturbed, the holes in Grafton’s public services gaped stubbornly, creating a spreading malaise.

Surprise dumbfucks

A theoretical private fire department run by Bob Hull never seemed to actually stop fires. A freedom-themed farmers’ market sputtered along for a while, then faded. A proposed public-service militia never got off the ground.

On the town’s few miles of paved roads, untended blacktop cracks first blossomed into fissures, then bloomed into grassy potholes. After voters rejected a funding request for $40,000 to purchase asphalt and other supplies, embattled town officials warned that Grafton was in serious danger of losing the roads altogether.

Grafton’s municipal offices declined from a state of mere shabbiness to downright decrepitude. As the town clerk and a few other staffers processed paperwork and fielded citizen complaints, they stood beneath exposed electrical wires hanging from the ceiling like copper-headed mistletoe.

And when the building’s envelope was breached, nature took full advantage: rainwater poured through major roof leaks and seeped into the side walls, while a biological torrent of ants and termites entered a thousand unseen cracks, crawling over walls, floors, ceilings, desks and, if they did not move frequently enough, people. Tracey Colburn, the town’s administrative assistant (seemingly one of the few people in town who did not own a firearm and who did not care for politics), resigned.

Other indicators also seemed to be moving in the wrong direction. Recycling rates dropped from 60 percent to 40 percent. The number of annual sex offender registrations reported by police increased steadily, from eight in 2006 to twenty-two in 2010—one in sixty residents.

In 2006, Chief Kenyon joined state authorities in arresting three Grafton men connected with a meth production lab in the town, and in 2011, Grafton was home to its first murder in living memory. After a man was accused of being a “freeloader” by two roommates in a temporary shared living situation, he killed them both, using a 9 millimeter handgun and a .45 to shoot one of them sixteen times.

In all, the number of police calls went up by more than tw...

Because of funding constraints, the department’s lone twelve-year-old cruiser was frequently in the shop for repairs; as the police chief (whose request for a salary increase was defeated by voters in 2010) noted in his annual report, the need for repairs “created a lot of down time throughout the year.”

Municipal property tax rates in New Hampshire (which, remember, has no state income tax or sales tax) vary wildly. For example, the city of Claremont, a former mill town, had a 2010 rate of $11.94 per $1,000 of home value, among the highest in the state, and it spends that money on a robust offering of parks, infrastructure, economic planning, and public safety resources for its residents.

Small, rural towns tend to carry out these mandates on a shoestring budget, but some towns’ shoestrings are more frayed than others. For example, Grafton and its northern neighbor, Canaan, have similar household income stats but meet their obligations very differently. While almost all public officials in Canaan would describe themselves as fiscally conservative, Grafton has shown a savantlike talent for weaseling out of public costs.

Even in the late 1700s, when Grafton and Canaan were neighboring settlements with just a few hundred residents each, Canaan spent public dollars to feed its militia members during military training exercises, while Grafton voted against doing the same.

If a community attracts and retains people, it spreads the tax burden over more taxpayers and creates a virtuous cycle of economic growth and prosperity, but the difference between the two towns was that, where Canaan tried to attract people by emphasizing tax-funded services, Grafton emphasized lower taxes.

For two hundred years, the towns carried these differences through the quick boom and then the slow decline of the New England agricultural economy. During the boom years and up through the Civil War, both Grafton and Canaan were buoyed by the capitalistic forces that prevailed in an age of prosperity, with Grafton’s population swelling to 1,259 in 1850 and Canaan’s going a bit higher, to 1,682.

In 1881, when good times created a surplus in the town treasury, they voted at a town meeting to give everyone a tax-free year. And in 1909, not long after it first declined to fund a fire department, Grafton stymied a plan to build a $150 police station, leaving a chain of police chiefs no choice but to work, conduct interviews, and store criminal records in their own homes for the next eighty-two years.

Grafton’s population in 2010 was 1,340, just a hair more than in 1850. But over that same time period Canaan’s population ballooned to 3,909, despite its higher taxes.

In 2001, the municipal budget included $520,000 in local tax money (a figure that doesn’t account for other revenue sources, like state grants). By 2011, the municipal budget contained just $491,000 in taxes. Factoring in inflation, the town had reduced its buying power by 25 percent, even though the population increased by 18 percent over the same time period.

Before the Free Town Project began, the town’s legal expenses were usually less than $1,000 per year—they totaled $275 in 2004. But after the Free Town Project began, a more litigious mind-set emerged in Grafton and the town’s legal bills began to mount, reaching $9,400 in 2011.

Before the beginning of the Free Town Project, providing public assistance tended to cost the town less than $10,000. But by 2010 that expense had more than quadrupled, to more than $40,000.

Libetarians are parasites

After 150 years of community building, Canaan had an elementary school, churches, restaurants, banks, a gift shop, two bakeries, pet boarding facilities, a metalsmithing shop, meeting halls, convenience stores, farms, an arts community, a veterinary clinic, and dozens of small businesses, each of which added something to the town’s identity and sense of community.

But Grafton had low taxes. Or, to be more accurate, taxes that were low in theory. I assumed that, after all those years of resistance, Grafton’s tax rate would be a fraction of Canaan’s, but I learned that the difference is actually quite modest. Because it has managed to maintain larger populations over the decades, Canaan can spend much more on public goods, while keeping tax rates in check. In 2010, the tax rate in Grafton was $4.49 per $1,000 of valuation, as compared to $6.20 in Canaan.

In other words, Grafton taxpayers have traded away all of the advantages enjoyed by Canaan residents to keep about 70 cents a day in their pockets.

In 2019, a group of Baylor University researchers decided to check in on people who favored low taxes over these sorts of “frills.” They looked at thirty years of data on public spending on optional public services and compared them to self-reported levels of happiness. Their findings suggest that Canaan’s success is no fluke, but in fact an entirely predictable outcome: states with well-funded public services have happier residents than those that don’t.

But there is one caveat. Public spending is associated with happiness, but it might not actually cause happiness, said the study authors. It’s also plausible that happy people of all income levels are simply more willing to spend tax money.

If that’s true, it would suggest that Grafton’s miserly approach to public spending didn’t necessarily cause unhappiness among its residents. Rather, the low tax rate may have been a predictable outcome for a town that had, over the years, become a haven for miserable people.

As the Free Town movement gained strength, so too did the enduring belief that too much tax money was going to the fire department. When fires are spread out over miles and decades, they do seem like only mildly distressing rarities. But the individual’s perspective masks the devastating consequences of fires, not only for direct victims, but for the community as a whole.

American optimism was muted in Grafton, which had dealt in its own strange way with financially backbreaking taxes and anatomically backbreaking bears; still, the Watsons prospered, servicing the cars of farmers and teachers, mill workers and tourists, hoteliers and railroad workers and shopkeepers.

It would only have taken a few minutes for a fire truck to drive from the center of Grafton to the Watsons’ garage, but that was of little value to the Watsons, in part because, in 1938, Grafton had no fire truck, and also, and mostly, because Grafton had no fire department. This was not simply a sign of the times. By 1938, the fire department in Hampton, New Hampshire, had been operating for more than a century. Canaan equipped its first firefighting squad with hooks, ladders, and hoses in 1890; Enfield, Grafton’s western neighbor, followed suit in 1892. But Grafton voters had refused to spend the money on firefighting, leaving other communities to literally carry Grafton’s water.

Canaan’s firefighters had to contend with not only the distance but also Grafton’s infrastructural shortcomings, which included a total lack of fire hydrants. (This deficit was addressed by the federally funded Civilian Conservation Corps, which built a series of strategically located firefighting retention ponds, but Grafton neglected their maintenance until natural sediments filled them in, rendering them worthless.)

With the garage and house as yet unscorched, the Watsons watched while Canaan’s crew knocked the flames back in the barn. But just when the blaze appeared to be under control, the pump got stuck in the mud, interrupting the flow of water. As the firefighters worked desperately to unstick the pump, the fire rekindled itself. The Watsons could only pace as a reinvigorated inferno consumed the rest of the barn, then the garage, and then, heartbreakingly, their home.

“A gruesome sight,” wrote a Watson descendant, adding that, by the morning’s light, they could also see for the first time that someone, in a decidedly non-neighborly manner, had stolen many of their salvaged household possessions from the field.

The burning of the Watson buildings was part of a rash of seven unexplained conflagrations that year, sparking rumors that there were, in addition to thieves, arsonists among the more upright citizens.

Unchecked structure fires were vaporizing piece after piece of Grafton’s social fabric, helping push the town away from the enlightenment preached by Banks from his Pinnacle and toward a new age of barbarism.

One of Slab City’s massive charcoal kilns exploded on a Monday morning in 1888; the resulting blaze destroyed several homes and the local charcoal industry, forever. A few years later, Grafton’s biggest sawmill, capable of making one million board feet of lumber per year, burned down to its stone foundation.

Two years later, on a Sunday morning in spring, a defective chimney caused the Grafton Center train station, along with several homes (though not, thankfully, the Grafton Center Church), to burn to the ground.

In 1939, just months after the Watsons lost their home and garage, Grafton’s selectboard finally—finally!—decided to take action. During a town meeting, the selectmen asked voters to approve five installment payments of $400 per year (roughly $4,200 in 2019 dollars) to finance a fire truck, fire pump, hose, and accessories. Voters said no.

Though Grafton had nothing in place to address structure fires, the state supported a fire warden program that tried to prevent forest fires by issuing burn permits and educating the public about safe storage of flammable materials.

a man named Les Seamans

Oh come on