Brook Farm
a New England socialistic community. It was organized in 1841 by George Ripley and his wife. Two hundred acres of land were purchased near West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Among those interested were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Amos B. Alcott, Charles A. Dana, Ralph W. Emerson, Theodore Parker, George W. Curtis, and Margaret Fuller. It was proposed to found a cooperative colony, or club, to farm, practice various kinds of handiwork, and to live simply and inexpensively. The members desired to be free from carking cares in order to have ample time for mental development. The plan worked seemingly well for a time. Surplus products were sold to outsiders. Educational work of all grades, from school to college, was undertaken. Outsiders were permitted to attend on payment of a small tuition. In 1843 the association came under the influence of certain ideas of Fourier. The interest of many members fell off in consequence. In 1846 the principal building was destroyed by fire, and in 1847 the organization broke up.
The following, adapted from the Blithesdale Romance, is Hawthorne's merry account of the community:
Our little army of saints and martyrs were mostly individuals who had gone through such an experience as to disgust them with ordinary pursuits. Thoughtful, strongly-lined faces were among them; somber brows, but eyes that did not require spectacles, and hair that seldom showed a thread of silver. We had very young people with us, it is true,--downy lads, rosy girls in their first teens, and children of all heights above one's knee;--but these had chiefly been sent hither for education, which it was one of the objects and methods of our institution to supply. Then we had boarders, from town and elsewhere, who lived with us in a familiar way, sympathized more or less in our theories, and sometimes shared in our labors.
On the whole, it was a society such as has seldom met together; nor, perhaps, could it reasonably be expected to hold together long. Persons of marked individuality--crooked sticks, as some of us might be called--are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a fagot.
In outward show, I humbly conceive, we looked like a gang of beggars. We all of us seemed to have come with the one thrifty and laudable idea of wearing out our old clothes. Such garments as had an airing, whenever we strode afield! Coats, with high collars, and with no collars, broad-skirted or swallow-tailed, and with the waist at every point between the hip and armpit. Every mother's son of us would have served admirably to stick up for a scarecrow. And the worst of the matter was, that the first energetic movement essential to one downright stroke of real labor was sure to put a finish to these poor habiliments. So we gradually flung them all aside and took to honest homespun.
To be sure our next neighbors pretended to be incredulous as to our real proficiency in the business which we had taken in hand. They told slanderous fables about our inability to yoke our own oxen, or to drive them a-field when yoked, or to release the poor brutes from their conjugal bond at nightfall. They had the face to say, too, that the cows laughed at our awkwardness at milking-time, and invariably kicked over the pails; partly in consequence of our putting the stool on the wrong side, and partly because, taking offense at the whisking of their tails, we were in the habit of holding these natural fly-flappers with one hand, and milking with the other.
They further averred that we hoed up whole acres of Indian corn and other crops, and drew the earth carefully about the weeds; and that we raised five hundred tufts of burdock, mistaking them for cabbages; and that, by dint of unskillful planting, few of our seeds ever came up at all, or, if they did come up, it was stern-foremost; and that we spent the better part of the month of June in reversing a field of beans, which had thrust themselves out of the ground in this unseemly way. They quoted it as nothing more than an ordinary occurrence for one or other of us to crop off two or three fingers, of a morning, by our clumsy use of the hay-cutter. Finally, and as an ultimate catastrophe, these mendacious rogues circulated a report that we Communitarians were exterminated, to the last man, by severing ourselves asunder with the sweep of our own scythes!--and that the world had lost nothing by this little accident.