Brook Farm

Brook Farm 1841-47, an experimental farm at West Roxbury, Mass., based on cooperative living. Founded by George Ripley , a Unitarian minister, the farm was initially financed by a joint-stock company with 24 shares of stock at $500 per share. Each member was to take part in the manual labor in an attempt to make the group self-sufficient. Intellectual life was stimulating, with such members as Nathaniel Hawthorne , John S. Dwight, Charles A. Dana , and Isaac Hecker , and such visitors as Ralph Waldo Emerson , W. E. Channing , Margaret Fuller , Horace Greeley , and Orestes Brownson . Brook Farm was mainly an outgrowth of Unitarianism , although most of the members had left that church and were advocates of the literary and philosophical movement known as transcendentalism . Economically, the community's excellent school was the most successful part of the venture (anticipating John Dewey's progressive-education ideas of learning from experience); agriculture showed little profit because of the sandy soil and the inexperience of the farmers. The popularity of the doctrines of Charles Fourier led, especially through the efforts of Albert Brisbane, to Brook Farm's conversion to a phalanx in 1844. The group, however, did not long survive the financial disaster of the burning (1846) of the uncompleted central building. The Harbinger (1845-49), printed at Brook Farm and edited by Ripley, was rather a Fourierist weekly newspaper than the organ of Brook Farm and was continued in New York City with Parke Godwin as editor after 1847.

Bibliography: See E. R. Curtis, A Season in Utopia (1961, repr. 1971).

Brook Farm, cooperative community (1841–47) near West Roxbury, Mass., nine miles from Boston. Under George Ripley, the Transcendental Club established the community to apply its theories, forming a stock company under the name Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education. Among those interested in it were Hawthorne, C.A. Dana, J.S. Dwight, G.P. Bradford, G.W. Curtis, Theodore Parker, Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, C.P. Cranch, Bronson Alcott, W.E. Channing, and Emerson. Of these, only Hawthorne, who wrote about it in The Blithedale Romance, and Dana and Dwight lived there. Among the objectives were the promotion of the great purposes of human culture and brotherly cooperation, in order to secure the highest benefits of physical, intellectual, and moral education. The life of the community was simple, all members sharing in the work and the educational and social advantages, and receiving similar pay. Occupations included the tilling of the farm, industrial employments, and school teaching. In 1843 it came under the influence of Albert Brisbane and soon turned into a Fourierist phalanx. As the U.S. center of Fourierism it issued The Phalanx (1843–45) and The Harbinger (1845). When an incomplete central phalanstery was burned, enthusiasm waned and the group dissolved (Oct. 1847). The Fourierist period is described in the Letters of Marianne Dwight Orvis.