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

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Grafton has made national news just twice over the past twenty years. In 2004, it received brief attention as the site of one of the most ambitious social experiments in modern American history, the so-called Free Town Project: freedom-focused libertarians from around the country announced that they would move to Grafton to “liberate” it from the strangling yokes of government. Then, in 2012, Grafton rose to infamy again when it hosted New Hampshire’s first modern credible account of a wild bear attacking a person in living memory.

He was a politician, and I was a journalist. We’d both learned that smiling while talking can patch over vast political differences, and so there we stood, smiling and nodding at each other while he explained how the libertarian philosophy of unfettered personal and property rights intersects with the issue of bear management. He told me the town’s bear problems were just a natural result of an incompetent government.

In neighboring Vermont in 1815, Governor Jonas Galusha, seeking reelection, proudly announced that he would hunt a particularly notorious bear known as “Old Slipperyskin” with a hitherto-unknown hunting method. Galusha slathered himself with female bear scent and strode off into the woods, only to return to his entourage at a full sprint, the bear behind him. (He lost the gubernatorial campaign.)

Just a year after the Declaration of Independence, Grafton produced the earliest surviving record of its disquiet with taxes—a May 1777 petition in which town leaders tried to convince the ruling New Hampshire Council that they should be exempt. Even accounting for a certain looseness in spelling common to the period, the petition was glorious in its semi-literacy. It got off on the wrong foot by mistaking the state in which they lived as “New Hamsheir” and went rapidly downhill from there, referring to state officers as, variously, “your honours,” “your Honners,” and “your Onners.” “Wee take this opertunyty to inform your onners that you demand more of us than Wee are Able to perform,” they wrote. They concluded their call for tax abeyance with more pride than word spacings: “sonomore.”

Grafton’s petitions were in fact part of a simple, two-step plan. Step 1: Ask not to pay taxes. Step 2: Just don’t pay them.

New Hampshire was a better bet for those who wanted to “Live Free or Die”—a state motto so beloved that, in the 1970s, when a Jehovah’s Witness covered up the words “or Die” on his license plate because they offended his religious sensibilities, the state jailed him.

libertarians. One of the pernicious obstacles to the growth of the party has been its commitment to following logic chains into whatever dark place they lead, regardless of social mores. That’s why, in one true sense, the philosophy is deeply ingrained with America’s founding principles but, in an equally true sense, still engenders earnest debates over whether consensual cannibalism should be legal.

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. “When it comes to tearing down this system, I’m right beside you the whole way,” he says. When the lights go out, he predicts that surviving capitalists will swiftly cannibalize themselves, and it doesn’t seem like he’s using the term figuratively.

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). At Grafton’s church-based town meetings, the once-civil tone of discourse became strained, as citizens debated amendments and motions under the double scrutiny of Free Towners openly displaying 9 millimeter handguns and armed officers from the Grafton County sheriff’s department, which decided it had better send someone, just in case.

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. They failed to muster enough votes to abolish the town planning board but did manage to stock it with libertarians, who effectively shut it down.

In one notable town meeting skirmish, resident Rich Blair grew upset with the libertarians’ formal proposal to declare Grafton a “United Nations Free Zone.” Rather than simply voting against the idea, Blair submitted an amendment that replaced “United Nations” everywhere it appeared in the proposal with the name of a certain cartoon character. 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.”

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.

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. The town rejected funding for frills like community Christmas lights and Fourth of July fireworks. 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.

Meanwhile, the constant bloodletting was turning the once-vibrant town government into a symbol of societal decay. 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. The town was also put on notice by the state that two small bridges were in danger of collapse, due to neglect.

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. With no money to replace the hot water system when it failed, staff were forced to wash their hands in icy water. 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.

As libertarians continued to worry away services, what emerged from the fray was not an idealized culture of personal responsibility, but a ragged assortment of those ad-hoc camps in the woods, some of which began to generate complaints about seeping sewage and other unsanitary living conditions. 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 aut...

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. This happiness gap held up among all sectors of society—rich and poor, well-educated and poorly educated, married and single, old and young, healthy and sick.

proposals to pay for a modern fire station before finally approving $25,000 in 1993. As part of that deal, the volunteer emergency responders were required to “donate” $15,000 to the project. The station was the last major capital program approved by town voters, and it would become the place where things happen in Grafton—not only for emergency responders, but for the entire town, which uses it as an official meeting space. Though it now operated from a reasonably modern building, Grafton’s fire department never received funding on par with neighboring towns. In 2019, Enfield spent $220,000 on its fire department and ambulance services. Canaan spent $261,000. Grafton spent $29,000. But the volunteerism that once allowed Grafton to fight fires on the cheap has been waning. These days, when a fire truck first arrives at a fire scene, it is often empty of firefighters, save for its single volunteer driver. The driver is also the new fire chief—who, after recruiting some libertarian firefighter volunteers to the department, had earned the post on an 8–2 vote in 2007.

Every time a Free Towner was pulled over for a traffic infraction, or came to the town office, or appeared before a judge, or was sent a formal letter, they took the opportunity to vigorously defend their freedoms, typically sapping already strained public resources in the process.

Chief Kenyon’s annually reported call statistics showed that, by 2010, the number of civil issues he responded to more than doubled, and the number of neighbor disputes nearly quadrupled, as compared to the years before the Free Town Project started.

Perhaps the only area of broad agreement is that bears symbolize the wild places that endure beyond the boundaries of human development. But in fact, the idea that America’s undeveloped places are a pristine wilderness—a faithful echo of the prehistoric era—is pure myth. We can preserve an individual butterfly by pinning its corpse to a corkboard, but as naturalists like Bernd Heinrich note, we can never pin down anything so complex and dynamic as an ecosystem.

Because bear ranges are now dictated by roads and human food sources, they are susceptible to being fragmented into isolated islands of habitat, which can have dramatic consequences for their gene pools. A handful of New Hampshire bears were recently diagnosed with gangliosidosis, a genetic disease that affects brain development; in humans its symptoms include exaggerated startle reflexes and dementia. Researchers say that the number of New England bears with the disease indicates that they may be experiencing the “founder effect,” which happens when a population of animals has been genetically isolated from other groups and is thus susceptible to a lack of genetic diversity.

The overall effect is a bear torn between the unique dangers and caloric payloads that humans provide—they are more sleep-deprived, more anxious, more desperate, and more twitchy than the bear that nature produced. Though modern-day humans and conservationists pay well-intended lip service to the idea that they are restoring the woodlands’ most magnificent ambassador to its rightful arboreal throne, in truth they are more like Dr. Victor Frankenstein—stitching together the elements of life they have at hand in the hope that the resultant creation will serve the needs of humanity, rather than turn against its maker.

The survivalists, beginning to get uneasy, decided to respond. First they posted a sign by the trash bins that read NO BEARS ALLOWED. It seemed unlikely that the bears could read, but you never knew, right? Bears had recently torn down and broken a man’s tree-mounted game cameras four times, as if they were convenience store burglars disabling the security camera system. So maybe a three-word sign wasn’t beyond their capabilities. Anyway, the sign boosted morale and solidarity among Tent City’s humans by reminding them that the bears, not the survivalists, were the interlopers here.

Not until later did I realize that Adam and Doughnut Lady, who lived relatively close to each other, had both tried to communicate with what were almost certainly the same exact bears using the same exact words—“Go away! Go away!” But while Adam intended for the bears he shouted at to retreat, Doughnut Lady intended for them to simply be patient for an imminent snack time. This underscored just how confusing Grafton’s people must have seemed to its problem-solving bears. Every house was a potential source of calories, but the people who inhabited them might flee, or sic a llama on them, or offer food, or throw firecrackers at their head. It was a lot to sort out.

The primary thrust of the campaign is to help people manage their garbage and bird feeders in ways that are less likely to attract bears. These are valuable lessons, but also convenient for the state, because they deflect bear complaints back onto the complainant, or the complainant’s neighbors, rather than on the state policies that have effectively stocked the woods with bears. Telling people to change their behavior is far cheaper than investing in an effective trapping and relocation process (for the bears, not the owners).

Rats don’t have a monopoly on tyrosine hydroxolase, or on dopamine either—it turns out that all mammalian brains, including the ones nestled inside human skulls, use dopamine to control what social scientists call “motivational salience.” It’s the all-important cognitive process that motivates us to move toward desirable and pleasurable outcomes, like hugs and cheesecake, and to move away from dangers, like gunfire and Reddit forums. For example, Sapolsky cited research proving that toxo-infected people are three to four times more likely to be killed in car accidents that involve reckless speeding.

What seemed clear was this: in a town that refused to allow the government to protect it from bears, vigilantism seemed the only option. Just as the libertarians wanted, it was every man, woman, and bear for themselves.

And anyway, their vigilantism hasn’t helped, not really. It put a brief dent in the local bear population, but nothing more. With Fish and Game administrators still too overworked to step in, the woods soon teemed with more bears. Graftonites may have thought they had a bear problem, but you could equally say it was a problem caused by the retreat of their sworn enemy: taxes.

I’m unclear on whether owning three guns makes one feel thrice as safe as one gun, or if gun ownership is, like potato chips and birthdays, subject to diminishing returns.

Though they had similar lineages, the Free State Project was markedly different in tone from the Free Town Project. Where the Free Towners were brash and extreme, the Free Staters were polished and sophisticated—an infinitely difficult demeanor to pull off given that libertarians are by definition on the political fringe and hold positions that have rarely been tempered by the burden of leadership.

Though the Free State Project had already attracted thousands to New Hampshire, the Trigger brought fresh life to the movement, and new political allies emerged. One such ally was an independent presidential candidate named Vermin Supreme, who declared soon after the Trigger that he was switching to the Libertarian Party. Supreme, who has been running for president since the 1990s, is easily recognizable for his signature look—a long gray beard that forms a vague counterbalance to the boot he wears on his head.

After the Trigger, the libertarians quickly gained steam in the New Hampshire legislature. In 2017, three young state legislators—two Republicans and a Democrat—announced that they were switching their party affiliation to Libertarian, thereby creating a legislative caucus, and by 2019 the Free Staters counted twenty state representatives among their ranks, not to mention scores of school board, selectboard, and municipal committee seats.

With the support of its new Free State lawmakers, the New Hampshire State Legislature did away with licensing requirements to carry loaded, concealed firearms and abolished criminal penalties for small amounts of marijuana or hashish. It also passed measures to deregulate cryptocurrency, legalize home poker games, require police to get a warrant to track cell phones, exempt hair braiding from barber licensing requirements, legalize fireworks, allow brew pubs to make cider, cut taxes on business profits, and eliminate a staggering 1,600 state regulations, many of which were considered obsolete.

At the Shire Society’s Church of the Sword, in-church activities include hard cider communion, combat with foam swords, and a “Ritual of Pie,” while out-of-church activities include lengthy legal battles over religious tax exemptions.

As the disconnect spread statewide, wildlife officials continued to push the limits of acceptable numbers of bears, and libertarians continued to promote a culture of civil disobedience and individual rights, including the right to feed or shoot the bears in one’s backyard. The stage seemed set for more conflict, one that would involve more deaths for bears and perhaps human casualties as well. Colburn and Rogers were both marginalized women living on fixed means in remote towns; neither was likely to make a fuss that could threaten the status quo. I wondered what would happen if the bears instead threatened privileged, politically connected people.

But nothing sapped the energy of the Free Town like the Free State. After years in which Grafton was the most visible and important landing point in the world for those who wanted to create a libertarian utopia, in the post-Trigger era, it became just another town in a state with many options.

Adam’s own plans for a survivalist community had been sidetracked by all the bear activity. After his Judge and the fireworks failed to deter the bears effectively, the survivalists decided that more drastic action was warranted. In a move that seemed strangely reminiscent of Donald Trump’s efforts along the southern border of the United States, the anarcho-communists of Tent City decided to build a big, beautiful barrier to keep the bears at bay.

That was the very quality that Babiarz believed was overlooked in every discussion of the Free Town. The combative libertarian colonizers didn’t get it. The overly regulatory state government didn’t get it. And the myopic media certainly didn’t get it. “They don’t recognize,” he said, “that the town was already free.”

He installed booby traps, though he was limited by the prospect of lawsuits from trespassers who might bumble into his coop. “There’s nothing explosive, a big boomerang coming out and chopping you, or anything like that,” he said, in the tone of a man who has made certain compromises. “But if you step through that window, there’s going to be pain.”