Thomas Lake Harris
| Thomas Lake Harris | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
15 May 1823 Fenny Stratford, Buckinghamshire, England |
| Died | 23 March 1906 |
| Home town | Santa Rosa, California, United States |
| Successor | Nagasawa Kanaye |
Thomas Lake Harris (1823–1906) was an Anglo-American preacher, spiritualistic prophet, poet, and vintner. Harris is best remembered as the leader of a series of communal religious experiments, culminating with a group called the Brotherhood of the New Life in Santa Rosa, California.
Thomas Lake Harris was born May 15, 1823 at Fenny Stratford in Buckinghamshire, England. His parents were strict Calvinistic Baptists and very poor. When Harris was five years old his parents emigrated from England, settling in the town of Utica, New York. His mother died when he was still a young boy and Harris was forced by circumstances to help support the family from the age of 9.
At the age of 21 Harris became a Universalist minister, preaching to the congregation of the Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York.
From 1848 he became minister of an independent Christian congregation in New York City. In that church he came into contact with young newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, who was so moved by one of Harris's sermons that he was inspired to organize Harris's congregation to help found the New York Juvenile Asylum.
Harris soon turned towards spiritualism, becoming a devotee of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. By 1851 he had departed New York for Virginia where together with Rev. J. L. Scott he launched the first of his communal enterprises, the Mountain Cove Community of Spiritualists, on pristine land claimed by one of the group's leaders to be the actual site of the Garden of Eden. It was intended to there create a "city of refuge" from which angels were to descend and ascend. The experiment proved to be short-lived, however, racked by squabbling over property and personalities, and after two years the Virginia religious commune collapsed.
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