Above: Brook Farm, where Dana stayed for a time. Brook Farm was one of many 19th century experiments aimed at finding ways to organize life and work without the appalling cost in human misery which was then evident in the cities, the countryside, and abroad. Some of these were organized by former slaves, others by religious, intellectual or industrial leaders. Many were associated with Charles Fourier's movement in Europe. Horace Greeley supported many and 2 towns renamed themselves after his death in his honor: Greeley, Colorado(formerly Union Colony) and Greeley, Pennsylvania(formerly Sylvania Colony). New Era and Aurora, Oregon, which, like Brook Farm, was led by a pastor.
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"My
father, Gottleib BOEHRINGER (?), was born in Wurtemburg, Germany, in
1827. When he was three years old the family came to America and settled
in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. My grandfather BOEHRINGER became a
follower of William KEIL, a Prussian preacher who severed all connection
with other churches and founded a communistic sect of his own in western
Pennsylvania. When KEIL'S followers had grown to about 500 in numbers
they sought a new location at Bethel, Missouri, where they founded a
self-sustaining communistic colony. When father was twenty-one years old
he joined this colony and was made an apprentice in the blacksmith shop.
In a few years he came to be foreman in the shop. "
"In the late 'fifties KEIL sought a new location for his colony, first in Washington and then at Aurora in Marion County, Oregon. Father was left with the parent colony in Missouri, but became a part of the second larger immigration in 1863. As soon as the party reached Aurora father left the colony and went to the farm of his brother who lived near Aurora. All he received for his fifteen years service was property in Missouri worth about a thousand dollars. He left the colony voluntarily and had no share in the division of property when the colony finally disbanded in the 'seventies. " "After leaving the KEIL Colony father practiced his trade in Portland, Salem, Albany, and finally here on the farm in Benton County. He came here in 1880 and worked as a blacksmith until 1912. He died in 1914. " |
| - Clarence Bareinger, Corvallis pioneer |
Brook Farm
George and Sophia Ripley founded and
created Brook Farm, but before the formation of the community, George had been
a pastor at the Purchase Street Church in Boston. He remained in the
ministry until 1840, and his home attracted Harvard Divinity Students. Many of
these students, such as Theodore Parker and John Sullivan, were trying to find
a middle ground between
Andrews
Norton’s traditionalism and
Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s decision to leave the church. George Ripley
objected that Norton would “separate the pastor of a church from the
sympathies of his people, confine him to a sphere of thought remote from their
usual interests, and give an abstract and scholastic character to his services
in the pulpit.” While still in Northhampton, Ripley sent a
letter of resignation to his congregation. Thus, the Ripleys set out
to find their own church to which they could be honest and faithful.
Emerson praised the Ripleys' decision because he knew that their church would
be more than a Sunday gathering place. Indeed, Emerson predicted that
their church would be an experiment in Christian living. Just as their
home had attracted men and women who doubted their Unitarian training, it also
became a point of contact between transcendentalists and social theorists.
These people helped channel the Ripleys into the idea of a community
that would eventually be called Brook Farm (Rose,
103-105).
Brook Farm began in April of 1841 with
George Ripley, Sophia Ripley, and about fifteen other members.
Henry
David Thoreau,
Elisabeth
Peabody,
Nathaniel
Hawthorne,
Herman Melville,
Margaret
Fuller, and Charles A. Dana all resided at Brook Farm. The farm was bought
from Charles and Maria Ellis, according to the deed on October 11, 1841.
Although it says nothing about it in the deed, another strip of property was
also purchased, called the “Keith Lot,” which consisted of twenty-two
acres. On the same day, the trustees--Ripley, Hawthorne, Dana, and
Allen--mortgaged the property to Daniel Wilder and
Josiah
Quincy to secure the payment of $6000 in three years and twenty-one days.
They also made a second mortgage to George Russil, Henry Sturgis, and Francis
Shaw at $1500 each, and to Lucy Cabot at $500.00. The tuition of one
pupil per stock share was entitled to each subscriber. No stockholder
had any claim on the profits of the farm besides the 5% interest.
Ripley stated the general goals for Brook Farm in a letter to Emerson in 1840 and in the Original Constitution of Brook Farm. The farm's goals were a systematic statement of what all the transcendentalists had been looking for: individual freedom and humane relationships. Specifically, however, the transcendentalists sought harmony, the merging of values, ideas, and spiritual matters with physical events, the union of mind and body, spirit and flesh. At Brook Farm, and in other communities, physical labor is perceived as a condition of mental well-being and health. They believed that manual labor was uplifting, and thus, every member, even the writers and poets, spent at least a few hours a day in physical effort. Another expression of the connection of flesh and spirit is manifested through the abundance of physical tasks performed at Brook Farm. The members of Brook Farm believed that they could create a microcosm of society that would eventually serve as a model for and inaugurate the social macrocosm.
Charles Fourier was a French Utopian Socialist who lived from 1772-1837. He was the only son of a cloth dealer, a business which he inherited and despised. During the French Revolution he lost his inheritance and his brush with the Terror of 1793 left him permanently jarred against revolutionary violence. As early as 1803, he called himself the "Newton of passionate attraction.” He devoted his adult life to solving the problems of the market economy and by the early 1830’s, he had attracted a small group of followers in Paris who published a journal called La Reforme Industrielle. Fourier believed that the cause of conflict and suffering was the perversion of natural human goodness by fatally flawed social organization. However, he was convinced that reason could discover the laws of harmony and create more satisfying economic relationships. He believed European civilization was repressive and against man's happiness. He advocated a solution of small planned communes, and he called then phalansteries. He devised a blueprint precisely indicating the size, layout, and industrial organization of each community or “phalanx.” Organized as both producers' and consumers' cooperatives, the communities would escalate economically and fulfill all man's passions.
Fourier believed that God was a “supreme economist” who had devised a plan for a perfect society creating human “happiness” and “riches.”
In the United States, Fourierism was
introduced to the American public in 1840 when a New Yorker named Albert
Brisbane published a compendium of Fourier’s writings entitled The Social
Destiny of Man. Brisbane also reached a wide audience through
the column he posted in The New York Tribune in March of 1842 and it
reached the Transcendentalists in particular with Emerson's essay on "Fourierism
and Socialists" in the Dial. Thus, Fourierism became
immediately popular and eventually laid the foundation for many of the
transcendental communities
Economy and Finances
Brook Farm began as an experiment in Christian living and became a center of reform activity to promote the beliefs of Fourierism. At the beginning, there was a serious purpose behind the Brook Farm amusements; the members were attempting to work out an economy that allowed everyone an equal chance for social, intellectual, and spiritual growth. The members of Brook Farm loved pleasure: music, dancing, gameplaying, charades, tableaux vivants, dramatic readings, plays, costume parties, picnics, sledding and skating. By offering a solution to economic problems, Fourierism brought the Brook Farmers in reach of their goals.
The Brook Farmers introduced several changes in social organization between 1841 and 1844 that involved three aspects of their economy: the plan for reuniting social classes, the voluntary system of labor, and the choice of agriculture as the principal industry. The object of these measures was to promote and able the free development of the individual.
The primary objective was to end the division of educated and laboring classes. They believed that both classes shared a common difficulty in that their work no longer met the standards of a calling. The Brook Farmers intended to share the labor on the farm in order to achieve economic self-sufficiency and therefore end wage slavery. “Everyone must labor for the community in a reasonable degree, or not taste its system in operation,” Elizabeth Peabody wrote in the Dial in 1842 . “By the wide distribution of these labors,” she continued, “no one has any great weight in any one thing." (Rose, 134) In another article, Peabody refers to seeing the men delay teaching Greek to nurture fruit trees and women spend the morning doing the laundry. Because they divided the labor, the members had a great deal of time to devote to one of their main goals, self-improvement.
While Brook Farm guaranteed equality in education and labor, membership in the association depended on ownership of property. Brook Farm was organized as a joint stock company. The price of a share was $500.00. Upon purchase, a member could then have the right to vote on community policies. (The second edition of the Articles of Association, drawn up in 1842, allowed a person to become a member by the vote of the associates.) The members of Brook Farm believed that private property was necessary for individual integrity. Ripley wrote a letter to a reform society in New York explaining this principle.
The voluntary system of labor was another reform undertaken in the interest of individual freedom. As Elizabeth Peabody said, “everyone prescribes his own hours of labor, controlled only by his conscience.” She noted also that the free atmosphere enhanced sociability. A person who did not perform an acceptable amount of work would find himself isolated and neglected and would not be able to continue living there. In 1841, the members voted to have more specific general standards for work: 300 days was considered the equivalent of one year’s labor, and ten hours in the summer and eight in the winter were considered one day. Several problems arose in which a new member did not perform an equal amount of work, and due to these cases, the members agreed to officially record hours of labor. Understandably, this type of rigidity at Brook Farm was disturbing to members who set up the community to encourage and facilitate moral growth.
The Brook Farm Institute for Agriculture and Education was the name the Brook Farmers chose for their community in 1841. It referred to the way they chose to unite labor and culture and to the way that they chose to earn their living. The transcendentalists perceived farming to be the occupation most favorable to personal growth because of its distance from the market, proximity to nature, and promise of a subsistence to protect moral independence. The Brook Farmers, unlike the member of Fruitlands, did however sell their milk, vegetables, and hay and kept their stock dividends low in order to keep enough capital to expand production. In one sense, the Brook Farmers operated something like a boarding school where the students paid in cash unless they worked on the farm. Furthermore, when the Brook Farmers admitted Lewis Ryckman, he initiated a new thriving business of shoemaking in the community. Thus, they were making money on culture, and this act demonstrates the Brook Farmers interest in practical economics as a means to social justice in the year before their allegiance to Fourierism (Rose, 130-140).
In the mornings everyone in the community would wake at approximately 6:00 am, eat breakfast, and then work for ten hours in the summer or eight hours in the winter. Even so, enjoyment was the first pursuit of Brook Farm. After the work was done and after dinner had been served, there was plenty of time for personal enjoyment and leisure. The members of Brook Farm had an insatiable desire for pleasure: music, dancing, cardplaying, charades, tableaux vivants, dramatic readings, plays, costume parties, picnics, sledding and skating. Even in stormy weather, impromptu discussions were started in the Hive. Literary societies and reading clubs were very popular at Brook Farm, as were the readings and performances of Shakespeare's plays. Musical visitors were common, and some members also sang. Anti-slavery gatherings in Boston and Dedham were attended by many members. But perhaps the most important and symbolizing custom at the Farm was "The symbol of Universal Unity." This ritual was performed by the entire company rising and joining hands in a circle and then "vowing truth to the cause of God and Humanity."
Letters by Marianne Dwight that describe life at Brook Farm.