Southpaw Culture
Factory School, 2008.
264 pages, 5.5x7.5.
isbn 978-1-60001-985-2 (paper) ;isbn 978-1-60001-981-4 (hardcover)

Publisher’s note
In 1933 a group of workers from New York, Detroit, and Chicago purchased the fourteen square mile Prarie Farm in Michigan’s Saginaw Valley. This is the story of the libertarian collectivist colony known as the Sunrise Co-operative Farm Community. Written by its founder, Joseph J. Cohen, and first published by the Sunrise History Publishing Committee in 1957, In Quest of Heaven describes the growth and development of the colony and offers insight into why it ultimately failed.

“Within the colony life must be organised on the basis of agriculture and hand-work. In agriculture, preference should be given to specialized and intensive branches of dairying, poultry-raising, apiary, truck gardening and fruit growing. Hand-work must include all the necessary and practicable branches of production for home use, the erection of buildings, preparation of clothes, repair of tools and machinery, education and recreation, hygienic and medical control and service, etc. The colony must from the start be composed with the view to having represented among its members all the skills, knowledge and experience necessary for its various activities.”
— “Project for a Collectivist Co-operative Colony,”
Freie Arbeiter Stimme, 1933.

“Sunrise stands for a new civilization, for a new, more just and better way of living. Whatever we do and build here will benefit not only the individuals doing the thing, but the whole group. And this is the way the social structure of the whole human race will in time, through suffering, strife and bitter conflict, reconstruct the relation of men towards each other. Competition and selfishness have ruined the world ; co-operation and solidarity are the only things that can save us. Sunrise is built on the rock foundation of co-operation.”
— Joseph J. Cohen, July 1935