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

 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 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 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. <SEP>  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. 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.  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  The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded by a preference for plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively.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. <SEP> 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. <SEP> 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.