The physical layering of utopian life on particular plots of land is not so unusual in the United States. Once an 18th- or 19th-century utopian community had cultivated a tract for communal living, unsurprisingly, the land was primed for the next generation’s version. For this reason, perhaps, these European-descendant American utopian communities are inherently tragic not only because they are always, every single time, doomed to failure—and often quick failure, sometimes disastrous failure. Could the basis of a utopian community be purely material then—cohousing, school, organization, residency? This edited excerpt from Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk, Counterpoint Press (2022) appears with permission of the author and publisher.