Malbis Plantation
From Greece to America
In 1906 a former Greek monk who took the name Jason Malbis found cheap land in Baldwin County Alabama and set up a commune where Greeks coming to America could work and live together. Self-sufficient and successful in agriculture and business, commune members lived as one family, without marriage or children. Greek was the everyday language. Greek Orthodox tenets were strictly observed.
In the 1950s, as the original colonists began to fade away, a new group of immigrants were brought from Greece but, unable to accept the strict morality and communal lifestyle of the older generation, one by one they drifted away. In the 1960s the last communards pooled their resources and built a magnificent Greek Orthodox church. Nearby, one by one they were laid to rest under identical slabs of marble, monuments to the immigrant experience.
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