Henry Watkin

Who was Henry Watkin?

Henry Watkin, was an expatriate English printer and cooperative socialist in Cincinnati, Ohio during the mid-to-late 19th century.

While a young printer in London, Watkin became interested in the utopian socialist writings of Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Comte de Saint-Simon. Although it is still unknown to what degree Watkin participated in any cooperative or communalist movements in England or America before the Civil War, evidence suggests that Watkin was an active member of a community of progressive and radical Cincinnatians during his professional life. In 1870, he helped to found the Cooperative Land and Building Association No.1 of Hamilton County, Ohio. The housing cooperative was organized in 1871 to build and develop a railroad suburb named Bond Hill just a few miles outside of the corporate limits of Cincinnati. Besides his work founding Bond Hill, Watkin is best known as the friend and fatherly mentor of the 19th century Japanophile writer, Lafcadio Hearn.

Henry Watkin was born in Pitsford, Northamptonshire, a village near Northampton in central England, to Baptist parents, William Watkin and Mary Hobson Watkin. The Watkin family was large and after his father's death at the age of six, Henry, his four older and two younger siblings were raised by their mother with income from the Watkin family's rental properties. As children, both he and a sister, Hephzibah, suffered grievous eye injuries, a circumstance which may have figured significantly later in his life. Watkin apprenticed as a printer under his uncle John Gardiner Fuller, an abolitionist and son of Andrew Fuller, in Bristol. Family letters indicate that in 1845 after staying for a period with another uncle, Reverend Andrew Gunton Fuller, in London, he traveled to America. By 1847 Watkin had made his way to Cincinnati where he worked for the Cincinnati newspaper, the Daily Gazette, a known organ for the land reform movement at the time. Within a few years, Watkin became foreman of the Gazette but left in 1853 to set up his own bookstore and printing shop. On May 26 of that same year, Henry Watkin married Laura Ann Fry, a dressmaker and woodcarver from a family of prominent artist craftsmen and Swedenborgians hailing from Bath, England.. According to the 1860 census of Millcreek Township in Hamilton County, Ohio, Laura and Henry were living in the Bond Hill area, the site on which, ten years later, Watkin's cooperative would situate their new community. In 1857, Henry and Laura had a daughter, Effie Maud Watkin. Henry Fry was a vocal and religiously inspired supporter of communism in England. While the Fry family was less vocal about their radicalism in America, their strong affiliation with the Cincinnati Swedenborgian community, and friendships with wealthy progressives and artists suggests that the Fry's and Henry Watkin were well within the mileiu of radical Cincinnati.