As noted the other day in my post on the death of democracy, Thomas Jefferson held that the townships of New England were "the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government." If indeed they are an ideal, it would benefit us to understand what they are and how they work. Toward that end, I'll introduce a somewhat extraordinary example: Monhegan Island, Maine.
Despite the fact that I grew up in Maine, I've never visited Monhegan. However, I've been intrigued by it every time I've flown over it on my way to Rockland, and I've read quite a bit about this fascinating place. The island is about a square mile in size and lies 12 nautical miles out to sea, accessible only by boat. A mere seventy or so people live there year round, though the population swells appreciably in the summer. Much of the island is owned by a non-profit foundation, started by Thomas Edison's son Theodore, that keeps the land in a wild state. The populated portion is dotted with cottages, seasonal lodgings and businesses, a library, a lighthouse, and an art museum (the island has been especially favored by painters, including Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, and the Wyeth family). There are no streetlights, no paved roads, no cars (a few fishermen have pickup trucks for work purposes), no airplane flights, no sirens, no policemen, no bureaucrats, etc. It's practically a 19th-century experience.
Because the island is so isolated, the folks who live there need to supply, on their own behalf, many of the services that mainlanders take for granted. In fact, the place isn't even a town, but a special form of government that exists only in Maine, called a plantation. Originally used for areas that were growing into townships, a plantation can't pass its own ordinances and thus needs to operate in an even more collaborative fashion than a town. As a result, Monhegan seems to function through a set of voluntary initiatives and interlocking associations that provide electric power, fresh water, dock maintenance, telephone service (they're working on broadband Internet), affordable housing, island-grown foods, and so on.
In short, as an article in the Island Journal put it some years ago, Monhegan is "one of the great anomalies of early-21st-century American life: an ancient, self-governing village, essentially classless and car-less, whose homes, sheds, and footpaths appear to have thrust themselves out of the wild and arrestingly beautiful landscape."
Granted, few people want to live in a place like Monhegan Island. Yet it's comforting to know that somewhere in America we still have an existence proof of radical self-government.
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
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