Freeland is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) on Whidbey Island in Island County, Washington, United States. At the grow old of the 2010 census the population was 7,812. The town standard its say based upon its origins as a socialist commune in the before 1900s: in the eyes of its founders, the estate of the town was literally to be pardon for whatever people. Some of the first settlers were veterans of a prior experiment in socialism, the open Equality Colony.

Some Equality Colony dissidents, led by George Washington Daniels, incorporated the Free Land Association in 1900 and acknowledged the colony on land they purchased through James P. Gleason of the Fidelity Trust company. Members purchased dividend-paying shares in the association addition fund and the machinery fund. The association heap operated according to Rochdale Principles, and shares in the deposit were sold to non-residents as skillfully as relationship members. Because members could pay for their estate with dividends from their shares, the founders considered the estate to be “free”. By 1902, however, the colony announced that additional settlers would have to buy land outright, as the idealistic land-financing point toward based on share dividends had not worked.

Daniels platted five-acre tracts with wide streets to form the original townsite. Additional plats were added higher than the bordering several years.

Freeland considered itself a long-suffering profit-sharing attachment and rejected the rigid communal structure of additional colonies on the island. They described themselves to the Whidby Islander as “simply a deal of socialists co-operating upon semi-capitalistic principles.”