CHARLES LEE BARRON
Dr. Elizabeth Nutting, left, one of Melbourne Village’s three Founding Mothers, shows the plans for the village
to a newcomer. The plans included green space and room for recreational activities.
SPRING 2022: 25
A simple wooden sign greets
visitors to Melbourne Village.
Villager Mabel Saunders so enjoyed
bidding hello to neighbors that the
sign was erected in her memory.
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dents would clear their own acreage,
build their own homes and run their
own small businesses to keep food on
the table, all while communing with
Mother Nature.
“The Village is a study in democracy
and in group and human relations,”
wrote Richard Crepeau in Melbourne
Village: The First Twenty-Five Years
1946-1971.
The community has always cherished
its individualism.
“There is nothing like it,” said professional
photographer Rob Downey, who
moved to the village in 1989 and served
as volunteer mayor of the town of 700-
plus residents.
NORTHERN BEGINNINGS
The story of the village begins in an
unexpected location: Dayton, Ohio. The
reason for its existence was based on
the very American principle of refuge
through community.
Dayton could not shake off the Great
Depression. Trying to help the poor was
the YWCA, which employed Dr. Elizabeth
Nutting and Margaret Hutchinson while
Virginia Wood was the organization’s
volunteer president. The three women
banded together to develop The Dayton
Plan, a self-help plan that included
garden allotments, clothing and shoe
factories and a bakery.
The trio wanted to expand from helping
the bottom of the economic scale to
address the problems of the middle class
unemployed. Hutchinson had attended
a seminar led by agrarian theorist Ralph
Borsodi and was excited by his ideas on
self-sustaining exurban communities. A
prototype community, Liberty Acres,
rose up, only to quickly crash.
World War II put the dream side, but
Hutchinson, Nutting and Wood did
not let it die, particularly after Nutting
met Dr. Norman Lennington, a Borsodi
disciple who also sold land in Melbourne.
“Basically, Lennington was a land
promoter who used the back-to-theland
movement as his hunting ground,”
wrote Downey’s former neighbor, the late
Georgiana Greene Kjerulff in her book,
Troubled Paradise.
OVERPAID FOR LAND
Lennington found them land thriving
with oaks and pines and palms and
pastures. The women knew they were
home and purchased 80 acres at $75
an acre.