Question: Was the namesake of the Ruskin Colony alive when the colony was founded?

Context articles: John Ruskin
Polistes versicolor
Ruskin Colleges
Ruskin Company
Colony of British Columbia (1858–66)
Necrophoresis
Colony Ramazzoti
Union Colony of Colorado
Ruskin Colony
Handy Writers' Colony

John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, as well as an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist.
 He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.
 His writing styles and literary forms were equally varied.
 Ruskin also penned essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale.
 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded by a preference for plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively.
 In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.
 He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, and architectural structures and ornamentation.
Polistes versicolor is a subtropical social wasp within "Polistes", the most common genus of the paper wasp.
 The most widely distributed South American wasp species, "Polistes versicolor" is particularly common in the Southeastern Brazilian states.
 This social wasp is commonly referred to as the yellow paper wasp due to the distinct yellow bands found on its thorax and abdomen.
 The "Polistes versicolor" nest is often described as a single, uncovered comb attached to the substratum by a single petiole.
 The yellow wasp is frequently found in urban areas.
 Its nests, made of chewed vegetable fiber, are often described as a single, uncovered comb attached to the substratum by a single petiole.
 These new nests and colonies are usually founded by an association of females, sometimes in human constructions.
 The "Polistes versicolor" colony cycle broadly ranges from 3 to 10 months although there appears to be no relationship between the colony's development and the season of the year.
 While the yellow paper wasps do have clear annual colony cycles, many young queens have the opportunity to hibernate during the winter, forming optional winter aggregations.
 Dominance hierarchies within these aggregations are characterized by physical aggression of the dominant female(s) towards the associated females who tend to be sisters.
 Within the colony, outside of aggressive behaviors, wagging movements are also often used as a form of communication within the colony.
 The yellow paper wasp is generally a predatory wasp, capturing a wide range of insects, although it often feeds on pollen and honey as well.
 Therefore, the "Polistes versicolor" can be useful as a pollinator or as effective pest control.
The Ruskin Colleges were a group of American colleges founded in the early 20th century by the socialist philanthropist Walter Vrooman, the college administrator George McAnelly Miller, and others, in the same spirit as the British Ruskin College, which Vrooman had cofounded.
 A core idea was for students to gain vocational training and earn their way through college by working in a cooperative business associated with the college.
 Ruskin Colleges were founded in Missouri, Illinois, and Florida.
Ruskin Company is a manufacturer of air control solutions.
 It was founded in the Ruskin Heights area of Kansas City in 1958.
 Ruskin products include fire dampers, smoke dampers, fire/smoke dampers, air control dampers, louvers, aluminum sunshades, air monitoring stations, economizers, energy recovery ventilators, high efficiency OEM fans, duct silencers, sound panels for equipment enclosures, industrial and tunnel ventilation dampers, and air curtains.
 The Ruskin Company brands include Ruskin, Reliable, Lau, Eastern Sheet Metal, Actionair, Air Diffusion, Naco, Ruskin Sound Control, and Ruskin Rooftop Systems.
 In 2014, Ruskin was acquired by Johnson Controls, INC .
The Colony of British Columbia was a crown colony in British North America from 1858 until 1866.
 It was founded by Richard Clement Moody, who became the first Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia from 1858 to 1863.
 At its creation, it physically constituted approximately half the present day Canadian province of British Columbia, since it did not include the Colony of Vancouver Island, the vast and still largely uninhabited regions north of the Nass and Finlay Rivers, the regions east of the Rocky Mountains, or any of the coastal islands.
 The Colony of the Queen Charlotte Islands and the Stikine Territory were merged with it in 1863, and it was amalgamated in 1866 with the Colony of Vancouver Island to form a new Colony of British Columbia.
Necrophoresis is a behavior found in social insects – such as ants, bees, wasps, and termites – in which they carry the dead bodies of members of their colony from the nest or hive area.
 This acts as a sanitary measure to prevent disease or infection from spreading throughout the colony.
 Although any member of a colony can carry the bodies, it is usually done by designated 'undertakers'.
 Ant undertakers have a slightly altered development cycle, and are much more likely than other ants to handle corpse removal.
 They are not restricted to performing only this task, but they do exhibit different behavioral and movement patterns than other members of the colony, which assist them in this task.
 Non-undertaker ants may also remove dead bodies, but do so with much less consistency.
 Differentiating between dead and living insects is accomplished by detecting their chemical signature.
 Depending on the species, this can be communicated by either the absence of chemicals that are present when they are alive, or by those released in decaying corpses.
 Corpses will either be taken to a random point a certain distance away from the nest, or placed in a refuse pile closer to the nest, along with other waste.
The International Art Colony ″Ramazzotti“ is an annual art colony held at the lakeside city of Ohrid in Macedonia.
 The colony runs every August for up to 20 invited artists.
 The colony attracts artists from all of Europe and North America and finishes in an exhibition of the artists' work.
 The colony runs similar to many other East European art colonies, forming a mixture of sculptors, painters, wood carvers and photographers.
 The colony was founded in 2003 by Zoran and Blagorodna Josifov from Kavadarci of Macedonia.
The Union Colony of Colorado (also called the Greeley Colony and The Union Temperance Colony) was a 19th-century private enterprise formed to promote agricultural settlements in the South Platte River valley in the Colorado Territory.
 Organization of the colony began in October 1869 by Nathan Meeker in order to establish a religiously oriented utopian community of "high moral standards".
 The colony was founded in March 1870 at the site of present-day Greeley, Colorado.
 Union Colony was financially backed and promoted by "New York Tribune" editor, Horace Greeley, a prominent advocate of the settlement of the American West.
 The homesteaded colony greatly advanced irrigation usage in present-day northern Colorado, demonstrating the viability of cultivation at a time when agriculture was emerging as a rival to mining as the principal basis for the territorial economy.
The Ruskin Colony (or Ruskin Commonwealth Association) was a utopian socialist colony which existed near Tennessee City in Dickson County, Tennessee from 1894 to 1896.
 The colony moved to a slightly more permanent second settlement on an old farm five miles north from 1896 to 1899, and saw another brief incarnation near Waycross, in southern Georgia, from 1899 until it finally dissolved in 1901.
 Its regional location within the Southern United States set it apart from many other similar utopian projects of the era.
 At its high point, the population was around 250.
 The colony was named after John Ruskin, the English socialist writer.
 A cave on the colony's second property in Dickson County still carries his name.
 The site of the colony's second settlement in Dickson County is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Handy Writers' Colony, often called simply the Handy Colony or The Colony, was a writers' colony located in Marshall, Illinois, which operated from 1950–1964.
 The Handy Colony was founded in 1950 by Lowney Turner Handy and her husband, Harry Handy, along with Lowney's student (and then-lover), best-selling novelist James Jones.
 Lowney Handy was the Colony's quirky teacher and mentor, with financial support coming from her husband and Jones, particularly after the sale of Jones' first novel, "From Here to Eternity".
 A unique aspect of Handy's approach was to have her students spend many hours simply copying, by hand or typewriter, materials from authors whose work she admired.