Shots from Harbinger Commune at Harbin Hot Springs in Middletown, CA, by Bob Fitch and Thomas Weir + some Harbinger publications ♨️
Before Harbin Hot Springs became a clothing-optional New Age spa operated by Heart Consciousness Church, it was the home of a commune called Harbinger starting in 1968. Don Hamrick was its unlikely charismatic leader. He was an architect, physicist and futurist interested in human potential, metaphysics and psychic phenomena, and he had a near-death experience in 1966 which changed him.
He was also friends with the Grateful Dead and Bill Graham, who organized concerts to benefit the commune like the Celestial Synapse event at Fillmore West in 1969, which deadheads still talk about. Under Hamrick, Harbinger published some beautiful far-out publications around 1969, like The Changes, which featured work from Victor Moscoso, R. Crumb, Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse and Lee Conklin.
Harbinger had about 120 members, with 27 shared vehicles that they maintained. Hamrick was also an avid pilot and flew his Cessna Twin airplane around almost daily to and from lecture halls, and there’s some rumors online that he was a CIA operative.
The commune only lasted a short time. Government code-enforcement and drug raids led to its shutdown and a new buyer bought the property in 1972. Hamrick then tried to start Harbinger East in Nova Scotia, after he met a woman there with a 29-room property and a sizable collection of unpublished Wilhelm Reich manuscripts, but it reportedly collapsed before it got going.
