Brook Farm

Edna Stewart
March 15, 2011
Is Our Seafood Safe?
March 17, 2011
Edna Stewart
March 15, 2011
Is Our Seafood Safe?
March 17, 2011

In the 1970s, I attended the University of Arizona in Tucson. Before that, I had never been further west than Lake Charles. The prospect of leaving the swamp and living in the desert both excited and frightened me. The first few months in Arizona I missed the green of Louisiana but slowly the desert wove its spell on me.

By then I had begun to realize how different the West was from the South. Students brought dogs to class, while some didn’t even wear shoes to class. For a while there, I really stood out with my maroon “Members Only” jacket and white buck shoes. Heck, I didn’t even have a dog to bring to class.


Slowly things began to change for me. I was westernized by my friends, took to wearing jeans, western shirts and cowboy boots. Sometimes I even wore those now extinct “earth shoes,” the kind with no heel that supposedly improved your posture. I didn’t care about that though. They were “in,” I was cool for the first time in my life (or so I thought), and every weekend I’d head for the mountains with a trusty bottle of Chianti, cheese and sour dough bread. There I’d commune with nature. At least that’s the story I’m telling my children.


But while I was “communing” with nature, I discovered that Arizona was really big into communes. You know, that phenomenon that started in the ’60s, grew for a while in the ’70s, then just sort of died out. Essentially, communes were hippies’ answer to what Republicans called “civilized living,” which was essentially living in a house with a refrigerator, a television, and a bathroom, soap included.

Communes rarely had any of that fancy stuff.


Communes were common in the desert and were a way to throw off the yolk of everyday living, proving you were anti-establishment to the degree that you were creating your own society in which everyone was equal, everyone participated in the simple job of farming and, depending on the commune, all rules, such as marriage, income tax, and diaper training, were thrown out. It was free love, free pot, free vegetables, etc.


Yeah, like that’s going to work. Nice concept, poor chance of succeeding in real life. Like its namesake, communism doesn’t work because everybody is not equal; everybody doesn’t work as hard as the hardest worker; and some people are just plain lazy. Sooner or later someone is going to get jealous and angry about how the free love affects his or her mate, then a sheriff is needed to calm things down but you need a mayor to appoint a sheriff and before you know it, you have elections, which is what no decent commune would ever allow.

End result: The commune either turns into the establishment it was trying to escape, or it dies a slow death.


The 1960s and ’70s might be known as the decade of brotherly love, anti-establishment philosophies and communal living, but a mere 120 years before a place called Brook Farm near West Roxbury, Mass., had already been established on all of those principles. A group of transcendentalists – a radical movement within the Unitarian Church that recognized a spiritual understanding of God beyond empirical evidence – embarked on the idea of Brook Farm.

Leaders of the group included literary critics and editors such as George Ripley and Margaret Fuller, writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, historians James Freeman Clarke and George Bancroft, and preachers and lecturers Bronson Alcott and Theodore Parker. It was an experiment in communal living that the transcendentalists hoped would serve as proof that the evils of capitalism and industrialization could be avoided.

The idea behind Brooks Farm, according to Ripley, the moving force behind the communal, was to establish a Christian community separated from all authority but God. In a real sense, Brook Farm was to be a place where man could conquer his dark, sinful side.

Originally about 20 scholars comprised the classless society of Brook Farm, although the population did reach about 150 people and included such notables as Charles Anderson Dana of the New York Sun and novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. Visitors also included such famous men as New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. Within four years, however, the commune proved to be too anarchic and the farm was restructured into a socialist community based upon the economic and communal concepts of Frenchman Charles Fourier.

By 1845, a weekly named The Harbinger was established and was published for two years at the farm before moving to New York City.

Ripley was editor while it was published at Brook Farm, and The Harbinger was undoubtedly one of the most unique newspapers of the 19th century.

Unfortunately, by 1847 Brook Farm could no longer finance itself and the bold experiment came to an end.

One final note: After several years away from the desert I visited a friend in an Arizona commune and I must say it was a fun road stop. Maybe not as much fun as my Chianti, cheese and sour dough bread, but fun nonetheless.

And please, don’t tell my kids.