Gottlieb bought the property on Graton Road in 1966, a working musician with money from record sales and touring. That same year, composer Ramon Sender and a handful of artists from the San Francisco counterculture moved onto the land, initially using it as a quiet rural retreat. But by 1967, Gottlieb had formulated something more ambitious. He coined the principle LATWIDNO -- Land Access To Which Is Denied No One -- and threw open the gates. The ranch became Morning Star, and word traveled fast through the network that connected San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to the rural towns of western Sonoma County. Members of the Diggers, the anarchist theater collective that ran free stores and served free food in the Haight, began arriving. So did students, runaways, draft resisters, and the simply curious. The commune's philosophy was disarming in its simplicity: "If you told no one to leave, the land -- the vibes -- selected the people who lived on it." Whether the vibes were actually selective was another matter.

By the summer of 1967, Morning Star had become an open, anarchic settlement with no formal membership, no leaders, and no limits on residency. Hundreds of visitors arrived on weekends. A smaller group of full-time residents built shelters from whatever they could find -- scrap wood, plastic sheeting, old doors. The site lacked formal sanitation, electricity, and building permits. Neighbors noticed. The complaints came in waves: noise, nudity, waste disposal, public health hazards. Sonoma County authorities responded with zoning citations and health code violations. Gottlieb fought them in court, arguing that the land should exist outside the framework of private ownership. His fines accumulated past $14,000. He was jailed for a week on contempt charges. County bulldozers flattened the makeshift structures on three separate occasions, each demolition billed to Gottlieb. The cycle of construction, citation, and destruction became a kind of grim rhythm, the counterculture colliding with building codes in the most literal way possible.

Morning Star did not exist in isolation. It was one node in a web of North Bay communes that stretched across Sonoma and Marin counties during the late 1960s. Wheeler's Ranch, a nearby property run by artist Bill Wheeler under similar open-land principles, became Morning Star's closest sibling. Olompali, in Marin County, had hosted members of the Grateful Dead living communally in 1966. The short-lived Chosen Family commune followed at the same site. Young people circulated between these places and the Haight-Ashbury, hitchhiking along the winding roads of western Sonoma County in a loose migratory pattern that treated the entire region as one extended commune. But the same forces that dismantled Morning Star -- zoning regulations, health inspections, neighbor complaints -- dismantled them all. By the mid-1970s, county-level crackdowns in both Sonoma and Marin had effectively ended the open-access commune movement in the North Bay.

The physical commune is gone. The structures were bulldozed, the residents scattered, and Graton Road returned to the quiet it had known before Gottlieb opened his gates. But Morningstar's afterlife has been longer than its actual existence. Ramon Sender spent decades compiling oral histories from former residents, publishing them as "Home Free Home," a record of what the experiment looked like from the inside. T.C. Boyle's 2003 novel "Drop City" drew heavily on the Morning Star story, translating its chaos and idealism into fiction. A play about the commune premiered in California in 2008. Even The Limeliters acknowledged the chapter when they reunited in the 1970s, their song "Acres of Limeliters" ribbing Gottlieb with the lyric: "while Lou played Executive Hippie at his Morningstar groupie rest home." Perhaps the most fitting tribute is at Twin Oaks Community in Virginia, an intentional community where the buildings are named after defunct communes. One of the residences is called Morningstar -- a name that still means open doors, even if the original doors closed long ago.