A long, strange trip

Thirty years ago, The Farm was the archetype of a model community. Today, it has shed communalism for capitalism. A writer visits a place of the past to learn its future.

It was, at its peak, the largest and most famous commune in America — a place where some 1,200 self-described hippies took a vow of poverty, kept house in school buses, and pledged to save the world. When I looked it up a few months ago, I learned that The Farm not only still existed, it seemed to be thriving. Back-to-the-landers had transitioned seamlessly into the digital age. Their website (thefarm.org) abounded with blogs, an ever-increasing tally of the cost of the Iraq War, sound files of poetry readings and a 25 percent discount on holiday orders of the Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook. The Farm had grown up, shifting from a zero-accumulation commune to a veritable industrial park of creative capitalism, not to mention a popular tourist destination. For me — a brown-rice baby, the daughter of hippies — The Farm represented the ultimate in counterculture living. Last fall, I visited The Farm for a few days, hoping to learn not just what it had become, but what might become of it.

 

The gate to The Farm — among 1,750 acres of red and white oaks, hickories and dogwoods in Summertown, Tennessee, an hour and a half southwest of Nashville — is tucked away on a tiny paved street, past miles of roadside churches and prefab houses. The closest business, the Summertown Store, rents DVDs and sells bait, tackle and five varieties of pork rinds. I pulled past the Welcome Center (which sells beaded jewelry and Farm history books), down their long driveway and felt…well, a mild sense of disappointment.

 

Where was the community? The Farm’s billowing fields of maidenhair ferns and goldenrod were largely uninhabited. Tourist season was over, the guest inn (called You’re Inn) closed, and the Eco-Village Training Center dormant. Their own FM station, 88.3 WUTZ, quietly broadcast Democracy Now and The Thom Hartmann Show. I saw a few modular buildings, rusty school buses and modest houses nestled in the woods. Deer leaped between the trees, certain of their safety here during hunting season.

 

There’s not a lot of communal space at The Farm, and there’s no longer any farming, save for a half-acre of blueberries. A wooden gazebo called Head of the Roads perches at the intersection of their main thoroughfares: First, Second and Third roads. Nearby is the motor pool — largely a collection of rusty Volvos tended by a mechanic with long hair and a beard, the unofficial style of Farm men. Beyond that sits the plum-colored Farm Store, selling tie-dyes and tofu, and about a mile away are The Farm School and the community center, where Farmies who wish to share a communal dinner gather once a week.

 

“There’s not a lot of togetherness,” says Peter Kindfeld, The Farm School’s principal. “But there’s a big feeling of togetherness.”

 

The pace of life slows considerably here; interviews that normally take half an hour lingered to two, which may be why I didn’t see the bustling community I’d imagined: People are inside, talking. Douglas Stevenson, The Farm’s unofficial spokesperson, suggested I come during the summer, to see a Farm day in action. “The blueberries are a major social scene,” he told me. But here I was in late fall, when The Farm slipped into hibernation.

 

The Farm’s original settlers were devotees of Stephen Gaskin, an English professor who taught at San Francisco State University in the ’60s. His infamous Monday Night Class — a primer on “God, the universe, life, and truth” — became a countercultural phenomenon, attracting as many as 1,000 attendees of all ages every week. 

 

In 1969, a group of Methodist ministers invited Gaskin to speak at churches across the country; a year later, Monday Night Class hit the road. Gaskin and 300 followers, from students to businessmen, zigzagged across 7,000 miles in seven months, traveling in a caravan of dilapidated school buses to deliver their message of hippie-tinged moral rectitude — a sort of Protestant work ethic applied to Timothy Leary.

When the trip was over, the Gaskinites craved a place where they could live out their values permanently. “It seemed like a good idea to get in the backwoods and do our own thing,” says Gaskin. They settled on Tennessee because “land was cheap and the people were friendly,” says Stevenson. “California was already eaten up by building codes, and communes had been bulldozed. Plus, anything anyone said in California was dismissed: ‘Oh, it’s just the crazy hippies.’ ” That they could be taken more seriously in another part of the country was key, because unlike many communes, which turned inward and sought refuge from the larger world, Farmies focused outward. (The sign on their Greyhound bus read: gotta save the world.)

 

So they pooled their money, purchased 1,000 acres of land, and parked those buses to live the  message they’d spent more than half a year promoting.

 

Outsiders gave them a nickname: “The Technicolor Amish.”

 

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