Intentional communities
Chico is the third intentional community I’ve lived in.
My first newspaper job was in Whittier, in Southern California. It was founded as a Quaker settlement. Richard Nixon, who came from a Quaker family, was its most famous (and most notorious) citizen.
Whitter College, which illustrates this blog entry, was just across the street from the apartment where my wife and I lived when we were first married. It was founded by Quakers. The old part of Whittier, known as Uptown, had the same settled small-town feel as Chico.
A decade later, to take another newspaper job, I moved to Lompoc, on the Central Coast. It was founded as a temperance community, an idea I’m sure the Bidwells would have loved.
Lompoc, unfortunately, had lost its settled, small-town appearance 25 years before I ever saw it. In 1958, it started a new career as a bedroom community for Vandenberg Air Force Base, which was built about 5 miles to the wes of the town. In less than 10 years, its population increased from 5,000 to 25,000. The small town had turned into a Southern California clone. I guess you could say this was the second phase of its evolution as an intentional community.
Chico was founded for the usual reasons — economic development. But I also consider it to be an intentional community because it’s so much the product of one man’s vision.
John Bidwell started Chico because he needed workers and consumers to help his enterprises grow. But that explanation always sounds too cynical to do Bidwell justice. Chico’s founder was also a public- spirited person. He was a community builder. He wanted to turn this wilderness into an outpost of civilization. He donated land for public buildings and churches. He helped persuade the state to build the northern branch of its Normal School here. He planted trees throughout his new town.
Bidwell made his mark on the entire state, so it’s not surprising that he had a hand in fashioning the city’s identity. Yet he wasn’t too heavy-handed. Had he been more of an egotist, we’d be living in a place called Bidwellville, not Chico.