The Ruins of Utopia

Melissa Chadburn explores the history of the Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony through the writings of Aldous Huxley.

By Melissa ChadburnSeptember 23, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• History

FIVE YEARS AGO, my wife and I moved to Wrightwood, a small town about 90 miles east of Los Angeles. There’s not a single stoplight, so when the first snow hits (yes, there’s snow here), the local hardware store hires a highway patrolman to direct traffic brought on by “the flatlanders.” The town sits in the high desert at 6,000-feet elevation and is known as the Land of Four Seasons. The Angeles Crest Highway that runs through town passes the spot where Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria lived from 1946 to 1949. The house they lived in is not especially notable—white with forest-green window details, set upon a rock foundation. Built by the town’s founders, Sumner and Kate Wright, in 1926, the house was originally supposed to be a US ranger’s cabin. The home contained a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, living room, and a small barn for the ranger’s horses.

At the time of the Huxleys’ residence, Wrightwood had a population of 300. Huxley was an avid teetotaler, and when the Blue Ridge Inn—now our swankiest restaurant—applied for a liquor license in 1948, he stood outside and campaigned against their sale of alcohol. Although he abstained from drink, he spent much of his time here experimenting with LSD and mescaline. Before he moved to Wrightwood, he lived 20 miles northwest in a town called Llano—the site of a failed utopia.

While in Llano, Huxley wrote much of Ape and Essence (1948), a futuristic follow-up to Brave New World (1932). Ape and Essence takes place in the year 2108, as our protagonist, botanist Alfred Poole, unveils the troubling 22nd-century way of life. Huxley also wrote his essay collection Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1956), which at times I find difficult to follow and I wonder if, after all, he was under the influence of some psychedelic or other even while writing. “Every human being is an amphibian—or, to be more accurate, every human being is five or six amphibians rolled into one,” he posits. The collection includes an essay about the Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony. According to Huxley, Llano opened on May Day, 1914, with five families, five pigs, a team of horses, and a cow. Huxley, his wife Maria, and their son Matthew moved to Llano in 1941.

One late morning in December, my wife and I set off to see what was left of the colony. We drove down Pearblossom Highway, passing first a clot of stores (Charlie Brown Farms, a store that boasts “FUDGE, FUNNEL CAKES, SMOKED MEATS”) and then vast dusty terrain interrupted with small crosses planted by the roadside. I saw, out in the distance, two lonesome stone fireplaces. We pulled off and followed the man-made trail amid a debris of empty cans and other trash. There were still the faint outlines of what was once a lively place. Rock structures framed big empty parcels of desert land.

Llano’s principal founder, Job Harriman, was active in socialist politics. He was a vice presidential candidate alongside Eugene V. Debs in 1900 and was very nearly elected the first socialist mayor of Los Angeles in 1911. However, Harriman served as defense lawyer for James B. and John J. McNamara, brothers accused of bombing the Los Angeles Times Building in October 1910. Harriman supported them on principle because of their radical politics, but they confessed to the crime just a few days before the mayoral election, taking him out of the running. He decided to seize this opportunity to leave Los Angeles altogether and build a socialist colony in the high desert. According to a 1972 article by Paul Kagan, a photographer whose work chronicled utopian communities, Harriman got more than 2,000 acres for only five dollars.

Another interesting character in this narrative, Alice Constance Austin—an upper-class radical from up the coast in Santa Barbara—developed the plans for this utopian co-op. Austin was drawn to the colony because she was interested in reshaping the concept of power in the private household, especially domestic work. Austin maintained that, in the traditional household, “each feminine personality must be made to conform by whatever maiming or fatal, spiritual or intellectual oppression.” In Llano, Austin proposed a city composed of courtyard houses of concrete construction, built in rows for a more equitable distribution of labor. The homes themselves would have built-in furniture to avoid a need for dusting in difficult spots. She insisted on windows with decorative frames, to do away with what she called that “household scourge, the curtain.” Each kitchenless house would be connected to a central kitchen through an underground network of tunnels. Within the tunnels, railway cars would deliver food, necessities, laundry, and so on.

I’ve spent much of my time troubling this out. Austin has been credited as a feminist architect, a designation supported, in part, by her design of kitchenless homes for the Llano community. My own brand of feminism needs to be bigger than that, allowing for cooking and the power that I’ve found in the kitchen. Sometimes the most feminist thing I’ve done all day is feed myself and the people I love. This gets to some larger questions: Who gets to define a utopia? And what makes for an ideal society?

By 1917, Harriman had accepted the applications of around 1,000 people. Every applicant had to buy 2,000 shares of the company’s stock, preferably for $1,000 in cash, with the balance paid off in labor (helping build the town, digging trenches, planting carrots, etc.). Huxley—who arrived three decades later—writes in his essay:

I have met three or four ex-colonists—older, sadder, possibly wiser—and all of them bore witness to the happiness of those first months at Llano. Housing, to be sure, was inadequate; food monotonous, and work extremely hard. But there was a sense of shared high purpose, a sustaining conviction that one had broken out of an age-old prison and was marching, shoulder to shoulder with loyal comrades, towards a promised land.

Aldous and his first wife, Maria, moved to Llano after Huxley attempted screenwriting in Hollywood. They seemed to love the desert: the Joshua trees, the wildflowers. But life in Llano proved difficult. The irrigation water was owned by a nearby rancher who only released it on certain days at certain hours. The Huxleys had a gasoline engine for generating light, but Maria Huxley begged everyone to use candlelight at night because the engine would cause a loud clattering throughout the house.

Llano was also vulnerable to more unexpected dangers: when Maria planted a ragweed outside the window of Huxley’s study, he broke out in an allergic rash all over his body. Maria writes in her letter to Grace Burke Hubble (Huxley’s copyeditor and the wife of his close friend, astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble) that, in addition to her husband’s allergies,

more and more am I dissatisfied with housework. Also did I realize with a sudden astonishment, this summer, that if I remained in the desert the size of the house, the location from every respectable center, and the responsibility of the whole place, would always make me remain a hustled slavy.

This was a far cry from Austin’s vision of kitchenless homes. In 1945, the Huxleys moved from Llano to Wrightwood, to that simple ranger’s house by the highway.

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When visiting the remains of Llano del Rio, I could see how everything in the early days might have seemed idyllic: the view, the birds, the sunlight. The sturdiness of the remaining structures alone is moving, a testament to all that shared sweat and hope invested in the idea of a place. 

Huxley’s essay on Llano is titled “Ozymandias, the Utopia That Failed,” an allusion to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous sonnet about ruined dreams of grandeur. As Huxley observed, there were aspects of human nature that Llano and its idealism couldn’t fully tame. He wrote, “There was a complainer named Gibbons who always groused about how things were run but was always too sick to do any work. Through subsequent years at Llano, slackers were called Gibbonites.” One group began holding secret meetings at night, calling themselves the Welfare League and demanding a popular vote on every plan before it was implemented.

Eventually, Llano ran out of much-needed water and resources, food was scarce, and there was too much friction among the group. The desert proved inhospitable. Eventually, the co-op filed for bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Harriman had found 20,000 acres of land for sale in Louisiana, and the board of Llano purchased it and moved the colony there.

How much does a socialist attempt to build a utopian colony mirror a colonialist endeavor? According to archivists Beverly Lewis and Rick Blackwood, “the cooperative’s bylaws did not state any racial restrictions, but an official letter from the California period specifically indicated that ‘Mongoloids and Negroids’ were not admitted. The colony did accept Jews, though—a very progressive step at the time.” These utopian projects were, of course, similar to the utopian project of the Americas writ large. Which brings us back to Huxley, and the anxieties he sought to express in writing Brave New World. I wonder whether, if he were alive today, he would think the dystopian world he created in his book has come to life? What would he think about the troops at the National Mall, ICE on the streets of Los Angeles?

Huxley recognized that a place like Llano was extraordinarily fragile. In his essay, Huxley writes,

Within twenty-four hours of their departure playful iconoclasts had smashed five hundred dollars’ worth of windows; within a week, a large frame hotel and several scores of houses and workshops had been demolished and carried off piecemeal by the homesteaders who precariously represented capitalism in the wilderness. Only the silo and the foundations of the cow byre remained; they were made of concrete and could not be hauled away.

Harriman eventually returned to California, where he later died of tuberculosis in 1925. An ambitious man named George T. Pickett became the manager of what was renamed New Llano out in Louisiana. New Llano eventually dissolved in 1939.

I looked at the long, tall cement silo that could still be seen across the dirt. The ruin looked almost medieval. I half-expected horses and jousting. In his essay, Huxley seems to be coming to terms with Harriman’s shortsightedness, particularly in not considering the limitations of the land. Huxley writes, “To the brute facts of meteorology in the arid country Job Harriman was resolutely indifferent. When he thought of human affairs, he thought of them only as a Socialist, never as a naturalist.” And yet, while Huxley accepts that the effort was futile, it should still be celebrated. Huxley ends his essay with these words: “But for any one who is interested in human beings and their so largely unrealized potentialities, even the silliest experiment has value, if only as demonstrating what ought not to be done.”

Up close, oddly, these ruins looked now like an emblem of surveillance—Foucault’s panopticon. Beside two low stone walls, like rows of teeth, a tall looming column, a watchtower over the town, with a sticker that declares “Warning: 24 Hour Surveillance,” buttresses a smashed hole, likely caused by a thrown stone.

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Featured image: Photo of Llano del Rio by Jaimie Sarra.