The history of The Kingdom of the Happy Land
In the violent years of anti-Black terror that unfolded in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, a group of freedpeople abandoned the place where they were enslaved in Mississippi and ventured into the nearby foothills of the Appalachian mountains in northeastern Alabama, walking north along the peaks and valleys in search of utopia. From Alabama to Georgia to South Carolina, dozens more freedpeople joined this collective march into the Mountain South.
"Follow me and I will lead you to The Kingdom… We are going to the Happy Land," proselytized Robert Montgomery, the soon-to-be king of the Black mountain utopia, according to one account.
Several sources locate The Kingdom's origin in 1866 when approximately 50 freedpeople traversed the mountains from the Deep South to a small mountaintop in Western North Carolina—the same year white supremacists established the Klu Klux Klan in nearby Tennessee while southern states passed the Black Codes to restrict freedom from the newly liberated Black American population. Over the next few years, The Kingdom is believed to have grown to a 200-person communal society with a king and a queen and a common treasury. The inhabitants were subsistence farmers and procurers of herbal liniments, namely a rheumatism treatment called Happy Land Liniment, which they sold in nearby towns like Hendersonville. Earnings from the liniment, harvested produce, and the freedpeople's outsourced domestic labor were deposited in the common treasury with the intention of purchasing the land they had established as their visionary settlement. Land ownership for Black Americans in the Reconstruction era secured freedom from sharecropping and other forms of labor theft that continued in the afterlife of American slavery. In 1889, Robert Montgomery purchased a tract of land from Septa Davis, the owner of a local inn.
The Kingdom is believed to have grown to a 200 person communal society which included a king and a queen and a common treasury. The inhabitants were subsistence farmers and procurers of herbal liniments, namely a rheumatism treatment called Happy Land Liniment, which they sold in nearby towns like Hendersonville, North Carolina.
Few historical records exist that help trace the history of The Kingdom. And without a written record, many of the discrepancies become hard to parse.
According to some source material, such as a thin book published by Sadie Smathers Patton titled, The Kingdom of the Happy Land, the communal society reigned for roughly 50 years, from the 1860s to the 1910s.