.

Acting on Fern Fenwick's advice, as soon as the site of the model farm
was chosen, Fillmore Flagg prepared an advertisement for publication in
three of the leading spiritual papers, setting forth the purposes of
the organization, together with the requirements necessary for
membership. The applications which soon followed were so numerous that
at the end of the first three months he had been able to complete a very
choice selection for the colony. Before the end of the next three
months, he had placed them on the farm, prepared for active work.

In the accomplishment of this remarkable feat in so short a time, he had
the able assistance of his trusted friends, George and Gertrude Gerrish,
who were, from the beginning, most thoroughly in sympathy with him and
eager to join him in the work. Fillmore Flagg had known them from
childhood and had learned to appreciate them as progressive people of
the most pronounced type, who were honest, courageous, and gifted to a
high degree with the power to win the love and confidence of all who
knew them.

George and Gertrude Gerrish were born and reared on Nebraska farms, near
the home of Fillmore Flagg. George was thirty-five; Gertrude, younger by
three years. They had been married fifteen years and were noted as a
handsome couple, being large, tall, straight and finely formed, with
strong, even temperaments. Their only son, Gilbert, was a delicate lad,
in his fourteenth year, handsome, spirituelle and intellectual to a
remarkable degree. He was a real genius, passionately fond of books, art
and music; already an accomplished player on both the piano and violin.
Yet withal, he was very reticent, sensitive and shy, on account of his
small size and deformed body, the result of spinal trouble caused by a
fall while an infant.

The Gerrish family, for the eight years previous, had resided in St.
Louis, where George and Gertrude were employed as teachers. When
Fillmore Flagg made them a visit while on his way west from Newburgh, he
was both surprised and delighted to find them spiritualists.

They at once became interested in his mission, and his plans for the
establishment of a model co-operative farm. At his urgent request, they
promised to move at once to the farm, whenever located, in order to be
prepared to receive the colonists properly as soon as they should
commence to assemble. This promise Fillmore Flagg considered a most
extraordinary piece of good fortune, and so it pr