BROOK FARM

A religious experiment in communal living (1841–47) at West Roxbury, near Boston, Mass. It was founded by George Ripley, a Boston Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist, and his wife, Sophia Dana Ripley, to manifest in miniature the Transcendental belief in a new world in which each man might develop his own talents according to the norms of individualism and self-reliance. Each member was to enjoy complete freedom as long as he did not trespass on the rights of others. Although it is not certain that the new association was consciously socialistic, it is clear that the founders did envisage a new attitude toward manual labor and the creation of a utopian society. As one of the Brook Farm students expressed it: "No Adventist ever believed more absolutely in the coming of Christ than we in the reorganization of society on a fraternal basis."

At Brook Farm all domestic work was divided among the members of the society. At first farming occupied most of the men, but when the land proved unproductive because of the lack of tools and skills, the community turned to manufacturing. Carpenters, shoemakers, and printers plied their trade, and Isaac hecker worked for a while as a baker. All labor was paid at the rate of one dollar per day. Room, board, and clothing were supplied practically at cost. The work week was 48 hours during the winter and 60 hours in summer. But it was in the field of education that Brook Farm truly excelled. The curriculum of the community school was well organized and included mathematics, classics, history, literature, modern languages, philosophy, botany, drawing, dancing, and music. Faculty and students lived together, with frequent contacts between teacher and pupil. There were no specific study hours, emphasis being put on the need for personal responsibility. Each student worked at least two hours a day at manual labor, and all were called upon to work in the kitchen or wait on table. Famous visitors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Orestes Brownson, Robert Owen, Horace Greeley, and Elizabeth Peabody, furthered the students' education by informal conversations, lectures, and dialogues. Many of the New England intelligentsia sent their sons there after the Harvard faculty especially recommended the Brook Farm school as an excellent place to prepare for college.

If it had concentrated on education, Brook Farm might have prospered, but its founders were more interested in universal reform. When the works of Charles Fourier, the French Socialist, were published in the U.S., Brook Farm turned itself into a Fourierist phalanx (1844), with little change in its original constitution. For the next four years it published the Harbinger, an important socialist paper that kept the community in debt. Meanwhile, the school was neglected as missionaries went out to teach socialism. After a fire destroyed a new and uninsured central building (March 1846), the community decided to disband and to auction all its assets to pay the heavy debts.

Bibliography: e. r. curtis, A Season in Utopia (New York 1961). k. k. burton, Paradise Planters: The Story of Brook Farm (New York 1939). a. f. tyler, Freedom's Ferment (Minneapolis 1944).

[e. delaney]