Heaven on Earth: the Brook Farm Community

In the 1840s, Boston's West Roxbury suburb -- which was completely rural at the time -- was home to an experiment in transcendentalist utopian living: the Brook Farm community. The idea was to create an environment of balance and equality.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fried and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today
we're going to talk about an experiment in utopian living.

(00:22):
I feel like this has been tried many times in
anyways it has. And even while this one was going on,
there were many many others going on. Uh So, to
give you some clues to what we're talking about. From
eighteen forty one to eighty six, Boston's West West Roxbury suburb,
which at the time was completely rural and it is
not so much now, was home to this experiment in

(00:44):
transcendentalist utopian living called the Brook Farm Community. And I
have read at the time that there were approximately eighty
other similar experimental communities going on in the US. I
was gonna say, were they all in New England or
were they all over I think they were highly concentrated
in New England, but there were a few and other
parts of the country. Uh. But it is a fascinating

(01:08):
concept to think about, like a bunch of like minded
people all kind of throwing in their lot together and
trying to live in a community where you know, they
all work together to sort of attempt to achieve a
blissful happiness. I see the appeal. I think, you know,
on paper, it's on paper, its great. And then in

(01:30):
reality and as we'll see, in practice, sustaining harder to
make that work long term, well, in sustaining yourself as
a community is pretty difficult. Uh. And the founder of
this experiment was a man named George Ripley. UM and
Brook Farm was really unusual because it was the first
community of its time that was secular. Uh. There were

(01:51):
many utopian societies launching, as I said, but the rest
were all pretty aligned with religious ideals. And we'll talk
a little bit more about the religion element later. Um.
But Ripley was a Unitarian minister, and he actually launched
the community with the idea that the residents could pursue
their scientific and literary studies there while also working. So

(02:14):
he wanted like a um working thinking balance. He and
his wife, Sophia Willard Dana Ripley were heavily influenced by
the Transcendentalist movement, which emphasizes a more intuitive spirituality and
being highly connected to nature and living outside the trappings
of societal rules. Uh. There are lots of famous writers

(02:36):
associated with Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson and also Margaret Fuller
and Luisa may Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who plays into
this story a bit. Yes, So the Ripley's envisioned a
place of balance and equality where people could live very
closely with the land, and on top of that, class,
gender and age would not play any part, and how

(02:59):
valuable a person was viewed in terms of the rest
of the community. Yeah, it's just that's a big it's
a big thing bakedown for society. Uh. And so how
this all got started is that George Ripley and his
friend Theodore Parker attended the Christian Union Convention in eighteen
forty and it's at that event that Ripley had the

(03:20):
idea for Brook Farm. And this convention was organized in
part by a group called Quote Come Outers, and they
were religious protesters who had left their churches to speak
out against all sects like they didn't want the separate
um elements of religion. They didn't see why we couldn't
all just come together in spirituality. Uh. And other delegates

(03:40):
at the conference also went on to form their own
utopian society. So Ripley was not flying solo in getting
this idea there. It must have been talked about, because
several other societies grew out of um the ideas that
people had while they were at that particular convention. And
I mean many of the attendees were seeing the tentional
of establishing communities where people could really simplify their lives

(04:04):
and shift to a more intuitive relationship with spirituality. And
so after that, Ripley resigned from his ministry UH to
pursue his dream of creating a sort of heaven on earth.
That was his His full time work at that point
was to figure out a way to make this idea
a reality. So he wrote a letter to Ralph Waldo
Emerson in which he described his ideals for what Brook

(04:27):
Farm would be like, and he wrote, our objects, as
you know, are to ensure a more natural union between
intellectual and manual labor than now exists, To combine the
thinker and the worker as far as possible in the
same individual. To guarantee the highest mental freedom by providing
all with labor adapted to their tastes and talents, and

(04:49):
securing to them the fruits of their industry. To do
away with the necessity of menial services by opening the
benefits of education and the profits of labor to all.
Thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated
persons whose relations with each other would permit a more
simple and wholesome life then can be led amidst the

(05:10):
pressures of our competitive institutions. Again, I see the appeal. Yeah,
that's a pretty good ideal. And while Emerson also saw
the appeal he was a proponent of transcendentalism, he actually
declined the invitation to join Ripley's group. He felt like
the societal changes that Ripley was hoping to catalyze with
Brooke Farm would actually be better served by individuals instead

(05:32):
of groups, and he wrote of it all failed to
see that the reform of reforms must be accomplished without means.
He didn't really want this big organized group to try
to change society. He thought you would do better one
on one, just talking with people. And I think what
what he was trying to do sort of see threads
of this today and the whole idea that people should

(05:53):
follow their passion and make their career based on their passion.
It's sort of a similar idea of like uniting people's
work with what's going to be meaningful to them, which,
as we know, often does not play out current reality
as something that is possible for all people. Uh And
Margaret Fuller, who we mentioned earlier as another writer that's

(06:13):
often connected to this movement, was also invited to participate
in brook Farm, but she declined for the same ideological
reasons as Emerson. She just didn't see or didn't feel
like this structured group way to do it was really
the best way to affect social change. So the brook
Farm Institute for Agriculture and Education was established in eighteen

(06:34):
forty one, and Ripley had figured out that he was
going to need thirty thousand dollars for the land and
the buildings and to support the community for its first year.
So he financed his vision by selling shares of the
farm for five hundred dollars each, which would later prove
to be a very bad, bad plan um and he
took contributions from like minded philanthropists. He bought a two

(06:57):
hundred acre dairy farm in West Roxbury, adjacent to the
Charles River, for ten thousand, five hundred dollars. On October eleven,
he didn't have any knowledge of farming, and so he
started to study agriculture as he planned the farm. And
most accounts will also say there's a reason it was
a dairy farm, which is that it had really awful

(07:18):
soil for actually growing crops. Yes, so they did focus
on the dairy part, but it may not have been
the purchase that a more seasoned farmer would have made. No,
and the fact that someone who has no knowledge of
agriculture is trying to start a community that's going to
sustain itself by farming sort of sets the stage. And
then they really got to the point where they had

(07:39):
the land and they had to figure out the actual
logistics of how this farm was going to work. So,
you know, they had the ideals of Transcendentalism, but the
Ripley's really like had to figure out how is Brooke
Farm going to function? And they had um decided that
the main farmhouse on the property, which was going to
be called the Hive, would serve as the primary dorm

(08:01):
and it also had a lot of the social spaces. Uh.
There was a community school which eventually moved into a
building called the Nest, and it was run by Sophia
Ripley and her sister in law, Marianne, and it was
designed to educate future citizens. Um jobs would be arranged
based on affinity so people could choose their work. As
he had said in his his letter to Emerson, they

(08:24):
were going to try to make people able to do
the jobs that most appealed to them, so they would
be most fulfilling. The work week required sixty hours from
the months of May to October, and then forty eight
from November to April. They'd also changed jobs frequently to
keep people from getting bored, and do lots of stuff

(08:45):
to try to make the tasks intellectually stimulating and enjoyable.
There's actually a story, please tell me, because about them
attaching little reading stands to like ironing boards, so that
people could be doing the are sort of menial ironing
tasks that had to get done and the laundry, but
at the same time they could be broadening their minds

(09:06):
and reading things that were of interest to them. Yeah.
I was sort of imagining a nineteenth century gamification of
milking or something, mostly lots of reading. And that's cool.
All of the labor, regardless of who was doing it,
got the same compensation and for people who weren't working.

(09:28):
The rent was four dollars a week, so you could
go and be at Brook Farm as a border and
not work, but you would have to be paying for
your your room and board. Uh. And there's a really
unique thing about Brook Farm and that it almost entirely
broke the role of women as housekeepers, which keep in

(09:48):
mind eighteen forties, so this is really pretty revolutionary in
terms of how uh the roles of women and men
are to find. But Aaron mcmris, who is a scholar
who was writing for the Unitarian Universalist History and Heritage Society,
made an interesting note about this particular element, and he says,
there really wasn't a household to keep. There weren't, at

(10:10):
least at the start of Brook Farm, many family units,
so the majority of the participants were young and unmarried
and without children. So in terms of keeping house and
it wasn't quite the same as if someone had moved
in with like their three children, and you know, they
had to make sure the kids were clothed and the
you know, toys were picked up, and it was a
little bit easier when it's all young singles to kind

(10:32):
of have everybody doing their own tidying and not have
to really have a housekeeper per se. So there were
twenty people to start, but that number quickly got a
lot bigger. Yeah, and it waxed and waned a little
bit as Brook Farm went on, But I don't think
it went down to that smaller number again until the end. Uh.

(10:54):
But the interesting thing that happened is it once the
initial enthusiastic optimism of life in a New Utopia war off.
It seems that the members of Brook Farm kind of
separated into two categories. One was the people that were
happy there and kind of found this simple life very fulfilling.
And people who realize that farming is hard and they

(11:15):
didn't really enjoy this whole toil thing. They were like, oh,
life of the mind, that sounds great. Weight shoveling manure. Yeah,
well that's sixty hour work week quoted before. A lot
of people today would find a sixty hour work week
to be horrible a lot. And it's it's not like
sixty hours of sitting at a desk, Like we're talking

(11:37):
sixty hours of, like you were saying, spreading manure and
plowing and yeah, keeping a farm going is a lot
of man hours. Uh, and it is. It's hard labor,
and most a lot of these people were not accustomed
to hard labor. Like I said, they came into it
from the intellectual mindset of like, oh, yes, we can

(12:00):
live with the land and in the meantime we'll be
reading all the time and studying. But they didn't get
that whole like we're going to have to cultivate the land. Yeah.
We grew all of our vegetables when I was growing up, Like,
I don't think we ever bought vegetables at a store.
And it was really constant work for the entire spring,
summer and fall. Yeah. I mean I I grow very

(12:22):
small amounts of things, and I have to I feel like, man,
why does this take me an hour a day just
to like check on plants and weed and and that's
my tiny, tiny little container gardens. So, of course, on
a farm, longer hours is actually probably a pretty reasonable number. Uh.
But the people that fell into that second group of

(12:43):
farming is hard did not stick around. Nathaniel Hawthorne was
one of them. I think he was. He's reported to
have only been there six months. Uh. But those that
remained referred to that disillusioned group as quote idealistic tourists,
and they criticized their lack of commitment to the project
and lack of community spirit. So as the group got bigger,

(13:04):
they needed more buildings, and financing them proved to be
kind of a problem. Yeah, before long the community found
itself in fifteen thousand dollars worth of debt, which, again,
by eight forty standards, is a lot to have to
make up because they were hoping this would be a
long term situation. By eighteen forty two, there were seventy

(13:26):
people living at Brook Farm and it was a success
and that it was drawing new people to live there,
but the expense of caring for the new people was
beyond what they could financially handle, especially because a lot
of these newcomers didn't actually make good on the investment
agreements that they had made to come there. So, because
many of the idealists involved in the community also found

(13:49):
money to be distasteful, there wasn't really somebody who was
just going to take control of the finances and make
people pay up. Yeah, So that thing that we mentioned
earlier about it being a five hundred dollar buy in,
like you would buy in your share if nobody's actually
giving you their five hundred dollars, and it uh was
much more of a problem with people that came in

(14:11):
later than the people that started out. But if nobody's
actually doing their part to you know, bolster the finances,
then you're really just hemorrhaging money. At that point, the nest,
which was operating as a boarding school and had an
excellent reputation, was really the source of most of the
community's income. But even so it didn't provide enough to

(14:33):
cover day to day costs, let alone the expansion plans
that they were going to need to house all of
the new people coming in. So from eighteen forty three
to eighteen forty four, George Ripley became more and more
interested in a new vision of the utopian society described
by French philosopher Charles Fourier. So Fourier's concept of communities

(14:55):
where social and commercial competition could just be completely eradicated
re appealed to Ripley, and he thought if he could
reorganize Brooke Farm to be more in line with fourier
Is m he could solve some of their problems by
attracting new members and new financial support. So the Brook
Farm concepts had always been a little bit at odds

(15:16):
with the individualism that was part of the Transcendentalist movement,
and that, as you recall, is why Emerson wasn't interested
in being a member. But Fourier's Utopia smoothed out that
particular wrinkle, and in a T forty four, Brook Farm
officially reorganized as a quote Fourier Fourier Phalanx, which is

(15:36):
a concept that he was a name he used for
his concept of these communities. But the remaining members who
still valued transcendentalist individualism left the community. This was actually
not like a quick and easy transition. There was some
infighting and arguing and and some rifts that you know,
cause people to leave. Under this new structure, the organization

(15:59):
became a lot more agid. Associates were organized into groups
under larger series divisions. There were three series and they
were the agricultural, mechanical, and domestic industry. Each group formed
in any series had to be arranged using so called
harmonic numbers, so a group had to have three, five, seven,

(16:20):
or twelve members, but not four, six, or eight. And
her history of Brick Farm, Linda Swift says, this was
of course stark lunacy. Uh there were huge there, rules
upon rules about how the business of these series and
groups was supposed to be conducted. And it was this
huge departure from the really intuitive approach that the community

(16:41):
had been founded on. Yeah, it really completely changed how
the whole thing was working, because it had been, you know,
so much of a a relaxed kind of atmosphere, and
now suddenly there were, you know, all of these guides
about how business was going to happen and how four
men of each group would report to one another and
report up to their provisors. And it felt a lot

(17:02):
less like the ideals that Ripley had initially founded the
community on. And the makeup of the group, as you
can imagine, changed as well as a consequence. And so
while the initial community at Brook Farm had been made
up almost entirely of Boston intellectuals, now tradespeople and working
class people began to fill in the gaps that were

(17:23):
left by those that had departed during the reorganization. Ripley
was very quick to point out that children from all
walks of life were equally successful in the farm's school,
and that the discourse among the adults was as robust
and lively as ever. Despite the diversity of backgrounds that
now lived there. So he was really trying to point out, like, no,
my ideas really do work. We're all equal here, and

(17:45):
that's awesome. But at the same time he had lost
a lot of the people that originally bought into his plan.
In eighteen forty five, Brooke Farm began producing a periodical
called The Harbinger. It was dedicated to four A Aism
and the philosophy of utopian society. Ripley hoped that this
new project was going to bring them some money, and

(18:07):
by this point there were more than a hundred people
living at Brook Farm, so it had grown pretty substantially,
and Ripley wanted to construct a new building that would
house all of them. At this point, they still had
the hive, but they had several of their smaller houses uh,
and he was really counting on the periodical to make
some money, so work began on the Great Community House,
which was to be called the Philanstry. With the increase

(18:30):
in Fourierism's popularity, Brook Farm and other utopian communities were
starting to be viewed with more and more suspicion by
the outside world. Rumors were spreading about sexual promiscuity and depravity.
And while these rumors were not true of Brooke Farm,
they were seated in four A's writings in which he
did advocate for sort of a free love model, similar

(18:52):
to what we think of with the nineteen sixties. In
any case, the gossip about this behavior in West Roxbury
was so devastated to the school's enrollment and consequently to
Brook Farms finances. Yeah, when your primary source of income,
you know, loses most of its um it's the checks
that are coming in, you very quickly find yourself in

(19:14):
a lot of trouble. And there was just more trouble
to come at this point. So as times got leaner,
tensions understandably grew among the Brook Farm residents. One resident
started hosting an outdoor Sunday service each week, and this
actually caused a big rift between those who were really
excited and welcomed this idea and those who had moved

(19:35):
to Brook Farm because of its secular roots. And we
should mention that religion wasn't forbidden or even unusual at
Brook Farm, but organized religion had not been a part
of the Farms foundation. Uh, people were certainly welcome to
be spiritual and worship in whatever way they wanted, but
the fact that this person was now hosting services really
rankled some people. And then to make matters where smallpox

(19:59):
hit the community after one of the members caught it
while visiting relatives in Boston and got back before he
developed symptoms, about thirty of the group had to be quarantined,
and then the healthy people in the group weren't able
to work on the farm because they were having to
care for the sick. Several pupils were removed from the
school by their families, which also reduced the little bit

(20:20):
of income that Brook Farm had. By this point, there
were four mortgages taken out on the property, so they
were in really bad financial straits. And it only got
worse because just after the smallpox outbreak, and to the
best my knowledge, I don't think they lost anybody during that,
They just lost productivity. They had very few deaths of
Brook Farm, which is kind of a happy face in

(20:42):
the midst of sort of this bad stuff going on. Uh.
But just after that smallpox outbreak, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had
left six months after it was founded, took legal action
against Brook Farm to try to get his initial investment
back since he didn't stay. And there had been a
provision in the original um tracks of brook Farms that
people could, if they gave enough notice get there, get

(21:05):
their investment back if they stayed a certain shortened period
of time. So he was within his rights. Uh, And
unfortunately there were just no funds to repay him. Ripley
actually agreed, Yes, he's completely within his bounds to want
his money back. I just don't have that money. And
it didn't help that Brook Farm had also lost its
primary philanthropic supporters. The people that were giving money to

(21:26):
these utopian communities had decided they were going to give
them to other communities that looked like they might have
greater success, and a last ditch effort to breathe life
back into the community, Ripley and the Brook Farm leadership
pushed forward on completion of the Philanstrey in eight This
was yet another case of the characteristic and misguided optimism

(21:47):
that had given Brook Farm such promise at the beginning,
but was also its undoing. It's really like any tale
of the chronic failed dreamer, where we just keep thinking,
just one more thing, we'll turn this around. Yeah, he
he really did. I mean everything that you look at.
It's like, no, we're gonna start publishing his paper. People
will buy it, and then we'll be fine. The school

(22:09):
is going to keep us afloat. But then, you know,
just one thing after another. He kept thinking I would
save them, and it never did. And then to kind
of kick them while they were down, they threw a
party to celebrate what was going to be the completion
of the new structure. It wasn't completed, but they were
kind of excited that they were moving forward and close
to the end. Uh. And this was on March third,

(22:30):
eight and during the party, a fire broke out and
consumed the entire building, So the Filan story was completely
decimated as they were trying to celebrate it. Uh. And
it was an unfinished structure and it had not been ensured,
so as it burned, so did the dream of Brooke Farm.
Because seven thousand dollars had been spent building the structure,

(22:53):
which had turned to ashes, and it was thought that
they were going to need another three thousand just to
finish it. But of course that money never out spent
because it wasn't there to finish. So they're basically out
on their investment of the building completely, completely, So not
having to spend that three thousand more dollars was not
not a lot going to help them, no, So that
was really the final nail in the community's financial coffin,

(23:16):
and it took its toll on the already lagging morale
of the people that had stuck it out and we're
trying to keep things going. So then just a few
months there were only a few dozen people left at
brook Farm uh and George Ripley, even though he was
still living there on the property, had kind of already
turned his focus to the New England for society. He
really stopped worrying about keeping it going because he kind

(23:39):
of knew what was going to happen. Towards the end
of eighteen forty six, the brook Farm Library collection was
sold at auction, and then in eighteen forty seven the
bankruptcy filing for brook Farm wrapped up, and in August
of eighteen forty seven it was officially disbanded. So Ripley's
transcendentalisk u topia only lasted for six years, and while

(24:01):
Brook Farm wasn't sustainable long term, it really did have
a pretty significant influence on many social movements going on
at the time, including abolitionism and the women's rights movement.
According to Linda Swift, who we referenced earlier, fourteen marriages
could track their roots back to the fellowship at brook Farm,
one of which actually took place there, and most of

(24:22):
those appear to have been happy. Another interesting point is
that the community had what could be considered a prototype
of the modern daycare, where the few parents among the
group could leave their children with caregivers for the day
while they set to their work, which had really never
been done before, at least on an organized level. Nathaniel Hawthorne,

(24:43):
who probably never got back his initial investment, wrote a
fictionalized version of his time at brook Farm called Lithdale Romance.
It's clear from it that he did not enjoy this experiment.
As for Ripley, he went on to become the literary
critic for The New York Trip June, and he held
that job until he died in eighteen eighty. After Brook

(25:04):
Farm was abandoned, the former dairy farm found other uses.
It was used as a poorhouse, as a Civil War
training camp, and as an orphanage. In nineteen seventy seven,
Brook Farm was designated a Boston Landmark. That same year,
the hive, which was still standing burned down. In ninety four.
Arson took the house on the property that had been

(25:25):
named after Margaret Fuller, even though she had never lived there.
In the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation acquired the
Brook Farm site. It lists the lands as a National
Historic Landscape and the buildings are all gone. In her
nine hundred book entitled Brook Farm, It's members, scholars and visitors,
Linda Swift, who he referenced earlier, says of the Brook

(25:48):
Farm community like some ill contrived play, the brook Farm
Phalanx lingered during one more act after all the essential
dramatic elements were exhausted. So even though it kind of
sputtered out at the end and had a lot of problems,
it's still kind of referred to when people talk about
it as sort of a success in terms of it

(26:08):
being a successful experiment, Like I think a lot was
learned from it, and from a sociological standpoint, I know,
people study it and kind of turnover and examine what
was right about it and what was wrong, And it
did to have some some pretty interesting influences on society
at the time. So in that regard, you could count
it as success. Uh, there were societal reforms linked to subceeds.

(26:31):
So there and it's so fascinating, and it was pretty
revolutionary that everyone, regardless of their sex or their age,
where their race, was going to be treated the same way. Yeah, yeah,
they're that's not really how eighteen forty grew. And there
are many many stories. I mean, we could you could
almost launch a podcast just about brook Farm and talk
about individual stories of people and events that happened there

(26:56):
because there are many, many of them, and most of
the bol that had lived there really spoke pretty well
of it, even though there had been problems. So it's
a fascinating concept to think about. I think I have
to wonder if someone tried a similar thing today if
it would work well. And I know a couple of
people that have lived essentially on communes at some point

(27:18):
in their life, none of them for their entire life.
It always seems to have been this three to five years. Yeah. Yeah,
my first my early memories are on the commune, and
then my parents left. Yeah. Yeah. There are many cases
of failed communes, but I think a lot of times
they implode in a much more dramatic way. This one

(27:39):
kind of like I said it was mostly about money.
I think, even though there were some ideological shifts throughout
its life, really the money was what killed it. Yeah. Well,
and even if you think you're prepared for the work,
the manual work, like if you were, if you are
an intellectual person who most of your life has been
relatively privileged, then the the sheer amount of manual labor

(28:02):
required just to raise your own food to shock crazy. Yeah,
it puts a lot of things in perspective. Yes, indeed,
so that's brock Farm. And I think you also have
some listener mail I do. I have a few too,
are well. They're all about our recent episode on the
domestication of the cat. Uh. One is from our listener Rosie,

(28:26):
who says she was surprised that neither of us had
a favorite famous cat in history, both of you being
cat lovers and history buffs. She says it might only
be ausee knowledge, but Matthew Flinders, the first man to
circumnavigate Australia, has a cat called Trim who was born
on board and sailed with him. Trim is pretty well
known in Australia, at least in his history and cat's circles,
and it's probably my favorite historical cat. I had never

(28:49):
heard of him, so that's super cool. And Kate also
wrote us and kind of said the same thing. Towards
the end of the show, you mentioned that you did
not know of any famous cats, so I thought I'd
share some with you. In the United Kingdom, the Prime
Minister has an official chief mouser of the Cabinet who
lives at Downing Street. This role was currently held by
Larry and Freya. The first of these cats was during

(29:10):
the reign of Henry the Eighth, and since ninety nine
there has been a line in the budget for petty
cash for the upkeep and maintenance of the mousers. I
love that. Another famous cat which links nicely to a
previous stuff you missed in history podcast is Unsinkable Sam.
Unsinkable Sam or Oscar was a German ship's cat originally
on the Bismarck, who was found among the wreckage of

(29:31):
the ship by British navy vessels. He was rescued and
then served on two British naval ships, surviving the sinking
of both of them as well. That is almost freaky
uh in one. After the sinking of his last ship,
he lived in the Governor's house in Gibraltar, before being
returned to the UK to live out the rest of
his life in a home for retired seamen in Belfast.

(29:51):
That is charming. Uh. The research suggests that the story
of Sam maybe an urban legend. He still is one
famous feline and some cat ended up in the seamen zone,
so those are famous cats we did not know about.
It was really cool. All I could think of was um,
President Clinton's cat socks, and he's not really famous except
for being that, Like there's I have never heard many

(30:13):
stories about him. So thank you both of you for
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