Brook Farm
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| Brook Farm | |
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| (U.S. National Historic Landmark) | |
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| Location: | 670 Baker Street, Boston, Massachusetts |
| Coordinates: | Coordinates: |
| Built/Founded: | 1841 |
| Architect: | Brook Farm Community |
| Architectural style(s): | No Style Listed |
| Added to NRHP: | October 15, 1966 |
| NRHP Reference#: | 66000141 |
| Governing body: | Private |
Brook Farm, was a transcendentalist Utopian experiment that was put into practice by transcendentalist and former Unitarian minister George Ripley and his wife Sophia Ripley at the Ellis farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.There were originally only fifteen members that included George, his wife Sophia, his sister Marianne, John Sullivan Dwight, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The community was in operation from 1841 to 1847, and was inspired in 1845 by the socialist concepts of Charles Fourier. The farm they lived on was influential to many writers like Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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[edit] Brook Farm's philosophy
The fundamental ideas of Brook Farm according to Ripley, were to,“combine the thinker and the worker...by opening the benefits of education and the profit of labor to all.” [2] At Brook Farm, and as in other communities, physical labor was perceived as a condition of mental well-being and health. It did not become a phalanx based on Fouirerism until 1845.
[edit] Landscape and Architect
It was named Brook Farm for the brook that ran near the roadside and that eventually went to the Charles River. (Gaskill, 299-300 in Myerson) “It was surrounded by low hills and its meadows and sunny slopes were diversified by orchard, the quiet groves and denser pine wood. “ (Gaskill 299,)
When the originally founders bought the 208 acres of land there was already a large farm house which was later called “The Hive.” The Hive became where social activities were held and where the people of community went to go eat their three meals a day. Like most communities the more people enter the utopian experience also the need for more lodging space. The first building constructed was “The Nest” where school lessons ran and guests of the farm would stay. During the second year of association Mr. and Mrs. Ripley house was built and later to be called Eyrie. The next building known to be built at the farm was Margaret Fuller’s cottage. Her home was used by Mr. Dana and other music teachers, it held three pianos. The last building constructed and was used for boarding pupils was know as the Plymouth house. (Gaskill, 302-303 in Myerson)
[edit] Education
Once Brook Farm was bought the first six months were spent getting started, especially in the matter of school. Mrs. Ripley was in charge of the issue of schooling. On September 29, 1841, the “Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education” was organized. The school was the most immediate (and at times the only) source of income for Brook Farm. They charged a pupil four dollars per week for room, board, and instruction. Every pupil and member of the community was to do one to four hours a day of manual labor on the farm. This work was always deducted from their bills. When entering the school each pupil under high school age was assigned a woman of the community who was in charge of their wardrobe, personal habits, and exercise. (Ripley 82, in Myerson). The main teachers at the school were Mr. and Mrs. Ripley, Mr. Dwight, and Mr. Dana. Mr. Ripley was in charge of teaching English and was known to be relaxed in his class. Mr. Dana was in charge of teaching languages, which he could commutate in ten different tongues. Mr. Dwight taught music and was an attraction for pupils enrolling in the school. (Gaskill 305 in Myerson) They studied European languages and literature. At no extra cost, pupils could indulge in the fine arts. (Ripley 82, in Myerson)
Within the school there was an infant school for children under six; a primary school for children under ten; and there was a preparatory school that prepared children for college in just six years; if anyone else wanted to take classes, elective classes were available.
[edit] Leisure Time
The people of Brook Farm spent most of their time either studying or working the farm but they always set aside time in the day for play. This time was spent at or participating in dancing parties, picnics, musicals, pageants, plays, and tableaux. The tableaux were the favored of all the entertainment. They acted out scenes from books and plays. Every week everyone in the community would gather at “The Hive” for a dance of the young ladies of the community. They would wear wreaths of wild daisies on top of their head and every week a wreath brought at a florist would be given to the best dress girl. (Gaskill, 302-303 in Myerson)
“My dress on this occasion was made by my mother. It was simple and was trimmed with flowers.”(Gaskill 303)
[edit] Women at Brook Farm
At Brook Farm, women were empowered and encouraged to showcase their creativity. They did have tasks that were typical of other women at the time such as simple food preparation, and shared house keeping. However, during the harvest time women were allowed to work in the fields and men even helped out with laundry during the cold weather. One of the best things for women at Brook Farm was the fact that no single religion could impose its beliefs on the community. This kept women safe from the typical patriarchy associated with religion at the time. Women were allowed to go to school and because of the well known education of women at Brook Farm, many female writers and performers visited the farm. George Ripley’s wife Sophia was very educated and was able to teach history and foreign languages at the farm. She even wrote the essay “Woman,” which challenged the images of women created by men.
[edit] Finances
Brook Farm was originally “financed by the sale of stock, a purchaser of one share automatically becoming a member of the institute, which was governed by a board of directors. The profits, if any, were divided into a number of shares corresponding to the total number of man-days of labour, every member entitled to one share for each day's labour performed.”[3]
[edit] In fiction
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a founding member of Brook Farm and presented a fictionalized portrait of it in his novel, The Blithedale Romance. (He acknowledged the resemblance in his introduction, saying "in the 'Blithedale' of this volume, many readers will probably suspect a faint and not very faithful shadowing of Brook Farm, in Roxbury, which (now a little more than ten years ago) was occupied and cultivated by a company of socialists.)" Some have seen a resemblance between Margaret Fuller and Hawthorne's fictional character Zenobia. In the novel, a visitor—a writer like Hawthorne—finds that hard farm labor is not conducive to intellectual creativity:
- We had pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor.... [but] the clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar—the yeoman and the man of finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and integrity—are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or welded into one substance.
[edit] Dissolution
During its later years, the Brook Farm community became more and more committed to Fourierist theories, and committed itself to building an ambitious communal building known as the "phalanstery (phalanstère)." When this building caught fire and burned to the ground in 1846, the community's hopes perished with it. Part of the land on which Brook Farm stood is a nature reserve, part is used by the Baker Street Jewish Cemeteries.
[edit] Notes
- ^ National Register Information System. National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service (2007-01-23).
- ^ Richter,"Utopias: Social Ideals and Communal Experiments," 1971.
- ^ Brook Farm." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 8 Feb. 2008 <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9016625>.
[edit] Further reading
- "Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States." Chmielewski. 1993.
- "A Season in Utopia." Curtis. 1961.
- "Brook Farm." Swift. 1900.
- “The Brook Farm Book A collection of First-Hand Accounts of the Community” Myerson. 1987
[edit] External links
- "Transcendental ideas: social reform" A history of Brook Farm
- History of Brook Farm
- Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography.
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