‘70s shots from Taylor Camp on the remote island of Kaua’i, Hawaii, by photographer John Weirheim. You can purchase prints and a book of Taylor Camp photographs on his website.
Taylor Camp was a 7-acre hippie treehouse village on the North Shore of Kaua’i with about 120 residents at its peak. It began with 13 hippies who were arrested for vagrancy but Howard Taylor, brother of Elizabeth, bailed them out of jail and invited them to settle on the beachfront property he owned. Taylor left them on their own with no restrictions, and waves of hippies, surfers and Vietnam vets soon followed.
The residents eventually formed a food co-op, enacted building codes, built a public water system with a communal toilet and sauna, and dug a landfill. They recruited a midwife and a Vietnam vet medic, and established places of worship.
Eduardo Malapit prosecuted the original Taylor campers, and later when he became mayor of Kaua’i he campaigned to shut it down. The settlement was condemned in 1973 and slowly petered out until 1977, when it was raided by local authorities and burned to the ground.
Today Mark Zuckerberg owns over 2,300 acres on the North Shore of Kaua’i, with no hippie camps.
