William Lee was a Philadelphia Quaker, a member of a rich merchant family that owned a shipping concern, a warehouse on the Delaware, and a large house on Walnut Street near Franklin Square. William worked for the family firm, but his older brother, Edgar, worked harder, and expanded the company by buying four textile factories in Kensington that William was charged with overseeing. Each factory employed about six men, chosen from among the off-the-boat population of English, Scots, and Irish that lived in nearby North Philadelphia neighborhoods, and William did his Quaker best to see that their lives were decent and their children went to school. He was mildly interested in the business and liked walking the streets among all the small factories, finding out who sold to whom and why—childlike questions that garnered him intelligence his brother sought to turn to profit by applying the principles of modernization and efficiency. Edgar Lee envisioned a complex the size of a city block where, rather than each small factory attending to an aspect of a final product, milling, weaving, dyeing, and cutting could all be done under one roof, with no other owner gaining from the process.
William saw the advantage to be had in the idea but argued against it. How could workers ever save enough from their wages to buy the factory from the owner and become owners themselves if faced with purchasing a massive operation? The brothers stared at each other across a gulf of difference. Edgar was a solid, civic-minded American capitalist whose business acumen was sufficiently bifurcated from his moral perceptions that he managed to believe that the lives of those who toiled for his riches were within a natural order, and all was fair; and William saw himself as an educated, free American man whose lack of constraint and easy path in life afforded egalitarian visions. They couldn’t see themselves and their positions clearly enough to dig to the bottom of their difference, which was rooted in personality, a subject that men of their ilk weren’t trained to discuss. Instead they argued about the Preamble, specifically the pursuit of happiness. What did pursuit mean, and how responsible was a person to facilitate that pursuit for others? They both agreed that the point of the document—and of democracy!—was that everyone is responsible for his fellow man and woman, but what did that entail? And so on. Edgar despaired of having a real partner in his brother, and William despaired of making so much more money than men he bossed. He believed there was a better way and hoped he could discover it.
He married Verity Hill of Germantown, had children, went to Meeting, and pursued many hobbies and interests. Among those was a category he called Nature, a passion he’d inherited from his father, Andrew Lee, at whose side he’d often rambled through unsullied fields and forests on the weekends. Andrew attended a lecture at the Spring Garden Institute in 1854 given by a man named Henry David Thoreau, who’d spoken about the importance of wild areas and described his solitary walks in remote places. His descriptions stirred Andrew, who immediately bought a copy of Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, a book that acted on him like a reveille bugle call. He became a conservationist and spoke to anyone who would listen of the necessity of a system of national parks where land would be kept pristine and people could go to fill their souls. William took these ideas to heart, and as a young man developed a habit of going off by himself for weeks at a time and coming back having learned new names for flora and fauna that he taught to his children. These ethereal acquisitions led him to an interest in conserving a spot himself, for as much as he was excited by the new, he also wanted to see the same again, and the federal government didn’t appear in any hurry to take up his father’s idea. William had a dream one night where a bird asked him to protect her eggs. He woke up with the idea of buying a piece of land where birds could be safe. Verity cautioned him to be judicious about describing his apocryphal vision, for fear he might be seen as too emotional. Quakers were meant to be moved by spirit, but only just so far.
In 1872, William took a trip by himself up the coast of Maine—Thoreau claimed it was the only unspoiled land left in New England—to visit relatives at their summer place in Sorrento. By chance he stopped at Cape Deel to rest his horse and buy food. It was a beautiful day, perfect conditions for curiosity to propel him southward. He removed the saddle from his horse to give her a break, then lay down on the grass and gazed up, daydreaming and imagining and reciting poems from memory. As he lazed, watching the birds and marveling at their abilities, he got a sudden jolt. He sighted a male Labrador duck, a rare creature by then and soon to be extinct. It was recognizable by its white wings and black body, a unique pattern that he’d read about in his bird books. He hadn’t put it down on his list of birds to look for; it wasn’t meant to be here. It wintered off Cape Cod and summered in Canada. But here it was, in Maine, and he might be the only person who knew it. Never before had he felt so essential. Something was happening—to him.
William got back on his horse and did his best to follow the duck, going the direction it went. He rode down the length of the Cape, sticking to the west side, and took a turn down a finger of land, a detour that became his destiny. The place had the feel of a dream, each of its features both natural and symbolic: a salt marsh along the lower side, teeming with wildlife and plants; a wild meadow running down the middle, dotted with trees and wildflowers; a long, flat west side sloping down to a rocky shore; and at the end, a point guarded by cliffs and fir trees where he got another look at the Labrador duck, as well as many other species. This was the land he’d been imagining, he had no doubt. He bought the whole 145-acre point for $7,500, another good deel.
The following summer William went back with a group of friends, including his brother Edgar, to camp out, bird-watch, and experience the freedom of life in the wild. The other men loved it as much as he did, and agreed he’d found a spectacular and unique spot, blessedly far away from the social pressures and Episcopalian mumbo jumbo of Newport and Bar Harbor. They ate from the sea and foraged for edible weeds and mushrooms and, after bracing dips in the cold water, lolled naked on the warm rocks and talked desultorily about rabbits and law cases and the future of the United States and birds and their businesses, and how wonderful it would be if this were life forever. William Lee said they all should come every year. They could form a club with that goal in mind. Edgar, who always thought bigger and wanted more, said they should each build a house here, a proposal that aroused cheers. If William felt a twinge at his brother’s commandeering of his land, that hesitation didn’t make it into the official origin story.
Instead, he was seized, as many Americans had been before him and would be again, by an idea to create a utopian community that conformed to Quaker principles and his own aesthetics. He spent a few months inventing the model, consulting with bankers, architects, and philosophers along the way. It was his opinion that a group of like-minded Friends would be better off having shares in an association than owning individual plots of land. The association would set standards for aesthetics and behavior and events that would benefit all. William would run it. The others could leave things to him and trust that their interests would be well served. He didn’t know any other man more willing to work on behalf of others than he was, with less self-interest, a skill he was happy to teach to anyone who would listen. Verity consoled him when crowds didn’t line up.