The Kaweah Colony, a cooperative community with utopian ideas, initially filed a timber claim in the Giant Forest. When the grove was included in Sequoia National Park in 1890 and their claims were disallowed, they leased a small sawmill on private land at Atwell's Mill. Due to confusion about the status of this land, they were ordered to stop logging in July of 1891. Although it was later determined that they did have a legal right to harvest the timber, the confrontation drained the last energy from the dispirited colonists and they did not resume logging. This old steam engine is one of the last signs of the mill.
