Brook Farm Association
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a community which originated in 1841, with William Henry Channing, George Ripley, and Sophia, his wife, with whom were united from time to time George William Curtis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Parker, Charles Anderson Dana, John Sullivan Dwight, Margaret Fuller, and other personages of a philosophic turn of mind. It started as an sopr expression of the transcendentalism then attracting philosophical minds in the region of Boston, and as a suggestion from the Fourier communistic movement in Europe. The dominating idea of the Brook Farm experiment was liberty; it was a practical protest against the long dominant Calvinism. An organization was formed, having those named and others as stockholders, and a farm of 200 acres was purchased in West Roxbury, 8 miles from Boston, where the Transcendentalists who adopted its main principle carried it into practice by working the land to the best of their ability and knowledge, which, however, were limited. That it ceased to exist, after five or six years, was due to the utterly unpractical natures of those engaged in the enterprise, which was finally abandoned after having been a financial failure from the beginning. The scheme of the association contemplated utilizing the labor-physically and intellectually-of each of its members, at a certain fixed rate, the intention being to dispose of the results of such labor to the outside public, and with such profit that all the delights and adornments of life were to be procurable therefrom, and were to be held in common by the members of the association. The whole undertaking was brought to a collapse by the destruction of the "Phalanstery" at Brook Farm, by fire, on the night of March 3, 1846.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The events Collier's described in 1921 are settled history and its outline still holds: Ripley's community began in 1841, converted to Fourierism, and never recovered from the fire of March 3, 1846, formally dissolving in 1847. What has shifted is the judgment. Modern historians are far less willing to blame "the utterly unpractical natures of those engaged"; they point instead to the well-regarded Brook Farm school, which paid its way and prepared students for Harvard, and to the debt incurred building the unfinished and uninsured Phalanstery. The West Roxbury land, later an orphanage site and a Civil War camp, is now the Brook Farm Historic Site, a state-owned property and a National Historic Landmark, where little remains above ground but foundations and a print-shop cellar.
Written for this edition, 2026.