![]() ![]() What else would explain Paradise Pizza in Utopia? Perhaps that trait comes down from their forbears. I can’t know this for certain and I would be glad to defer to anyone who has access to better historical records, but I’m posing that as a theory and a possible explanation. It would have been within their collective memory in 1884 when they learned that their first choice wasn’t available. I think it’s plausible that Utopia, Texas earned its name from the attempted socialist colonization that failed to ignite twenty years earlier. La Réunion collapsed right around the same time and interest waned. However this was a stillborn settlement and the commune never formed. Organizers even purchased 47,000 acres for that purpose. Another one of those communities was going to be located near present-day Utopia, Texas. The most well-known was probably Utopia, Ohio (aha!) near Cincinnati, which is essentially a ghost town today. The movement established other communes on the same basic set of socialist principals. Their name lives on in the Reunion District of downtown Dallas and in its landmark Reunion Tower ( map). A socialist utopian movement called La Réunion arrived in Texas in 1855 and they settled near present-day Dallas. That explains why it’s not Montana, but why Utopia? I don’t know precisely but I have a notion. That doesn’t answer the question, though. Does that make Montana better than Utopia? Waresville, meanwhile, largely disappeared over time although a few vestiges still remain. So the residents settled for Utopia instead. However, another town in Texas already claimed that name. Some of those Waresville settlers relocated about a mile north in the 1870’s and platted a new town. Texas had only recently joined the United States. Several sources point to an earlier name, Waresville, dating back to the 1850’s. The evolution is a bit clouded but I’ve tugged on a few threads and I’ve deciphered a plausible explanation. I can think of lots of places that would have lesser claims. Anyway, most people probably wouldn’t consider an isolated settlement on the outskirts of the Texas Hill Country as an embodiment of paradise ( map). I considered it a rather unusual definition of utopia. ![]() Utopia exists, or at least a town in Texas goes by that name. I like to learn the story behind the story. Something catches my eye and it pushes me towards the search engines to see if I can crack the code. It might be an inexplicable term, a palindrome, or simply a funny sounding phrase. ![]() Put simply, I enjoy counterintuitive geographic placenames. This quest seemed no different than any other I’ve pursued. Life is full of odd coincidences like that. I never guessed someone would publish a book during the same week focusing on the same place, but I’ll get to that later. This time curiosity led me to wonder if anyone had ever been bold enough to name a town Utopia. I don’t always understand how blog topics develop in my mind. ![]()
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