Old Picker's Cemetery, but his remains were moved during construction of a high school on the site, and now rest at New Saint Marcus Cemetery and Mausoleum in Affton, St. Louis County, Missouri, with a gravestone funded by the French Embassy. On February 15, 1858, the remaining Icarians settled in Cheltenham on the western edge of St. Louis, under the leadership of a lawyer named Mercadier, whom Cabet had designated as his successor. That colony would disband in 1864 (with several young men fighting in the American Civil War) and two families rejoined the Icarians in Corning, Iowa discussed below (the Cheltenham area became a neighborhood within St. Louis). Before his death, Cabet sued the Nauvoo Icarians in a local court, as well as petitioned the Illinois legislature to repeal the act that incorporated the community. The Nauvoo colony relocated to Corning, Adams County, Iowa, about 80 miles southwest of Des Moines, Iowa between 1858 and 1860, because of Illinois crop failures as well as the end of financial support from France following the Panic of 1857. The Corning Icarians prospered until another factional split in 1878, prompted by new emigrants from France, who left to establish a community in Cloverdale, California in 1883 (but "Icaria Speranza" lasted only four years). The colony at Corning disbanded in 1898, but by that time it had existed for 46 years, making it the longest non-religious communal living experiment in American history. The library at Western Illinois University has a Center for Icarian Studies, as well as Icarian archives and papers. The Nauvoo Historical Society also has some papers and artifacts on display, and some in the town remember the Icarians during the Labor Day Grape Festival, through a historical play. The connection with grape cultivation is more symbolic than foundational, as the growing of Concord grapes in the Nauvoo area did not begin with the Icarians. It sprang from efforts by a French Catholic priest in the 1830s, and expanded in 1846 when Swiss vintner John Tanner brought the Norton grape to the area. However, Baxter's Vineyards and Winery was founded by Icarians Emile and Annette Baxter in 1857, and continues as a 5-generation old family business. It is Illinois' oldest winery. References Further reading External links Encyclopædia Britannica Etienne Cabet Archive of Etienne Cabet Papers at the International Institute of Social History 1788 births 1856 deaths American anti-capitalists American Christian socialists