This Story Shivers Me Timbers

http://www.celestialmonochord.org/2008/10/rollingstone-out-on-highway-61.html

Rollingstone out on Highway 61
The Celestial Monochord | Journal of the Institute for Astrophysics and the Hillbilly Blues

The histories of Minnesota City and Rollingstone, two towns you pass along Highway 61 on your way out of Minnesota, begin with a Utopian crackpot whose followers became his victims in one of the more ghastly episodes in the state's history.

The Rollingstone Colony was a little like the Donner Party, if a lot less famous. Its story also reminds me a bit of the Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre.

In 1851, a New York printer persuaded a group of New York professionals to join a Utopian community. They would start fresh in a well-planned city out west in the health-promoting climate of the new Minnesota Territory. The town was to be called Rollingstone.

The leader went out west first, and when 400 people followed him, they found him stuck in a swamp. The women and children slept in a large tent, the men in gopher pits. About three quarters of them soon died in the epidemics that swept the settlement.

Wait. Come to think of it, that's more or less how I came to live here too ...

Anyway, the survivors founded Minnesota City. A small village two miles away is today called Rollingstone, but I'm unclear about precisely how the two towns relate historically to one other and to the Rollingstone Colony.

In any case, I'm thinking more about Bob Dylan and the mid-1960's.

PHOTO: Not Bob Dylan

It seems hard to believe that a Minnesotan would write a song called "Like A Rolling Stone" — a song about what it's like to find yourself all alone and boondoggled out on the new frontier — and that he'd put it on an album called Highway 61 Revisited without knowing anything whatsoever about the story of the Rollingstone Colony.

But then, a lot of true things are also hard to believe. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that Dylan seemed preternaturally relevant — that his empathetic imagination would insinuate itself convincingly beyond what seems possible. I've written about that before.

Maybe it's all a coincidence, but it might be worth looking into. I don't know if anyone's properly done the legwork to understand how well-known this incident could've been to Dylan in the early 1960's. My research time is currently booked.

I also don't know if anybody has ever asked Bob when, if ever, he first heard about the Rollingstone Colony down on Highway 61.

[ Retrieved entirely from HERE ]
Author's References:

Cathy Wurzer's just-published book, Tales of the Road: Highway 61, provides an efficient telling in two pages. She also talked about it today on Minnesota Public Radio.

Christopher M. Johnson's article in Minnesota History (49:140-148) provides much detail on how the community got to Minnesota.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
"A rolling stone gathers no moss..." 9proverb0
Comment:
I hope I am on the right side. This proverb came from the Sententiae of Publilius Syrus, and roughly translates as People always moving, with no roots in one place, avoid responsibilities and cares. I have always thought it meant something else. I thought that whatever is going on in your life if you just keep moving you will eventually get on the right course. I say, Rolling, Rolling like a river........