Grant, Elijah Phelps

Elijah Phelps Grant (1810-1874) was the leading American Fourierite in the country west of the Allegheny Mountains in the 1840's. Grant left his native Connecticut soon after being graduated in law from Yale College, and began the practice of his profession in Canton, Ohio. Early in the 1840's he became an enthusiastic convert to the social doctrines of Charles Fourier, and subsequently led in the establishment of the Ohio Phalanx, one of those experimental colonies, usually designated as utopian socialist, to which the Fourierist movement gave rise. The last six years of his life, 1868-1874, Grant spent in promoting a colony in Kansas. It came to be called Silkville, and was based upon an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to raise silk for profit.