Home, Washington, in its day was known as an anarchist hotbed, but many of its residents may never have considered themselves anarchists at all. Nonetheless the town had no mayor, no police, no government whatsoever, only a disparate grouping of people of varying backgrounds, ready to solve problems collectively as they arose, and interested in creating an environment wherein learning – for the old as well as the young – could daily thrive.

The definition of Anarchy and Anarchist Philosophy is often fraught with contradictions, both from its proponents as well as its detractors. At its best, its tenants are defined obliquely, through collective thought and action.

With this in mind we have developed the Second Home Archive to serve as a collection center concerning the history of Home, and its context.

Not an archive in the traditional sense - carefully thought out, organized, and astutely assembled to create a vision of a time and place - the Second Home Archive gains strength by opening up the data retrieval process, letting the viewer makes sense of the connections. By creating tag filters to mine key sites across the internet, the archive unleashes not only the chaos of ideas and data that reside at the core of the web, but it also creates an Archive as Metaphor. What does an archive that desires to look into thoughts on anarchism and free thought look like? What is conveyed through the random grouping of various forms of media on a particular subject matter that deals specifically with non-hierarchical systems? Focusing on anything from 1960’s on-the-fly documentary footage of Jerry Rubin, hand-written texts of radical printer Jay Fox, and slowed down folk renditions of Anarchy in the U.K., the thought, “who is in charge? What am I looking at? And, what does this all mean to me and my ideals?” inevitably comes into play, using the archive-as-form as a pedagogical tool investigating a place, a movement, a time, and a nebulous array of people who believed, and still believe, that a better world was/is possible.

With these thoughts in mind the archive can only begin to achieve a semblance of coherence (if that at all!) with your participation. If you would like to become a member of the Second Home Archival Collective please click here to join us in helping create this tool for understanding Home and its ideals.

The Second Home Archive is a depository for data on Home, Washington and the ideals that shaped it. That means anything from archival photos and documents concerning Home in its day, to historical touchstones from before, during, and after the heyday of this incredibly important community.

In adding, as well as while searching, for material to contribute to the S.H. Archive we encourage you to be as expansive as you feel is warranted in your associations on the ideas of Anarchy, Free Love, Progressive Action, Free Speech, Liberation, and Equality. What do these ideals mean to you? In what forms have they manifest themselves throughout history?

When tagging material, please be as descriptive as possible. The better we tag, the better the archive becomes.

We're excited to have you on-board,
The workers of the Mutual Second Home Association