Morningstar Commune UP134
Morningstar Commune (also known as Morning Star Ranch and The Digger Farm) was an active open land counterculture commune in rural Sonoma County, California near the towns of Occidental and Sebastopol.
Morningstar was part of the changing society of young adults in the 1960s that traveled back and forth between San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and Sebastopol. Co-founder Louis Gottlieb coined the acronym LATWIDNO (Land Access To Which Is Denied No One) to refer to the ranch and other similar communal-living experiments. They preached that "if you told no one to leave, the land (the vibes) selected the people who lived on it." The ranch existed in this form for a short time (1967-1972) but was a regular gathering place for many of those traveling through the Haight. Sonoma County finally placed a permanent injunction forbidding anyone but Gottlieb's family from living there and proceeded to bulldoze structures three times (at Gottlieb's expense). Gottlieb's fines for 'contempt of court' for not ordering people off the land finally totaled over $14,000. He also was jailed for a week on contempt charges. After all the turmoil, Morning Star ceased to exist by 1973.
