2011-02-20 Astascadero

Atascadero, California, was developed circa 1914 as a community of independent small farmers who worked together for the group good. At least that was the theory. What's left now is an unusual main hall, a shuttered Masonic Temple (ex the Printery, I think), and an unusual cemetery. And here and there signs of something unusual, like the tiled square near the hillside hiking park. For several years (approximately 1917-1921) the colony supported the largest rotogravure presses west of the Rockies, and printed THE ILLUSTRATED REVIEW, a nationally distributed monthly picture news magazine. This seems an unusual outlet for a community of small farms.