Burning Bush Colony, The

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Somewhere in Cherokee County, Texas, on land that used to be the Joseph Pickens Douglas Plantation, something unusual took root. A whole community.

A whole world unto itself, really. And it lasted exactly as long as it needed to, and not one day more. This is the story of the Burning Bush Colony.

The Metropolitan Church Association, commonly called the Burning Bush Society, was an evangelical organization founded in Chicago about 1900. Now that name, Burning Bush, carries a certain weight, doesn't it. Something that burns but is not consumed.

Whether the colony lived up to that image, well, let's just say the story has its own answer waiting at the end. By 1913, this organization had set its sights on Cherokee County, and they built something genuinely ambitious out there on that old plantation. Four hundred members.

That is not a prayer circle, friends, that is a settlement. They ran their own school, their own sawmill, their own power plant, their own water system, and their own sewage disposal facility. In 1913 East Texas, that last one alone put them ahead of more than a few towns.

They were not waiting on the outside world to provide a thing. The whole point was a self-sustaining agricultural community, and by most measures they came close. For six years, from 1913 to 1919, that colony hummed along on that land in this vicinity.

Six years of a community that educated its own children, cut its own timber, generated its own power, and drew its own water. And then World War I ended. And with the close of that war came the reckoning.

The colony, unable to pay its debts, disbanded. Just like that. The sawmill went quiet.

The power plant stilled. Four hundred people who had built something remarkable together scattered, and the land went back to being land. The Burning Bush Society had founded this colony to be enduring and self-sufficient.

But the debts had their own say in the matter. Some fires, it turns out, do go out.

What the marker says

From 1913 until 1919 a religious community operated in this vicinity on the former Joseph Pickens Douglas Plantation. The colony was established by the Metropolitan Church Association, commonly called the Burning Bush Society, an evangelical organization founded in Chicago about 1900. This 400-member Burning Bush colony was set up to be a self-sustaining agricultural community. It operated its own school, sawmill, power plant, water system and sewage disposal facility. Unable to pay its debts, the colony disbanded after the close of World War I.