"The New Life is Here": The Koreshan Unity and its Commercial Enterprises in South Florida, 1894-1961

The Koreshan Unity represented a number of nineteenth-century millennial societies that implemented their brand of eschatology and secular utopianism through the creation of self-contained, self-governed, and self-regulated communities.Historians recognize the Shakers, the Harmonists, the Perfectionists, the Zoarites, and the Koreshans as characteristic of such utopian endeavors.Often these communes undertook novel attempts to recast their social practices along egalitarian race, gender, and economic lines.Less often they explored equally unusual means to meld communitarian practices with the burgeoning business ethos of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States.The often misunderstood experience of the Messianic Dr. Cyrus Teed and his followers, the Koreshans, in south Florida aptly demonstrates that one of the leading communal societies did place a priority on economic growth in this time period, albeit for reasons other than the prevailing laissez faire capitalism of the era.Just as such groups as the Shakers owed their existence to Mother Ann Lee, the Harmonists to Johann George Rapp, the Perfectionists to John Humphrey Noyes, and the Zoarites to Joseph Baumeler, so the Koreshans owed their genesis and development to the charismatic and "divinely inspired" leadership of physician, metaphysicist, and would-be business impresario Cyrus R. Teed.By the mid-1880s, Teed, known to his followers by the biblical name of Koresh, claimed to be the Prophet Cyrus.He subsequently organized his dozens of disciples into the Koreshan Unity, which he described as a "post-Christian community of religious communism."Teed explained that although Koreshanity resembled Christianity, his sect would "supplant Christianity as Christianity [had] supplanted Judaism." 1 Teed gained notoriety for his unusual charisma, hypnotic lectures, and bold claims to being the "new Messiah . . .declaring the scientific Gospel" in the New York City area before moving in 1886 to Chicago, where he created a