Drop out, drop in
Vermont communes died out, but their spirit is part of the state
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Elliot Blinder and Jenny Buell of Tree Frog Farm commune in Guilford get ready to hike to Ray Mungo’s Total Loss Farm nearby on May 1, 1971. Every year, communes within a 30-mile radius convened for a May Day celebration. Peter Simon |
Toolbox
By PATRICK TIMOTHY MULLIKIN
Correspondent - Published: September 30, 2007
On the July 18, 1969, cover of Life magazine, a group of scruffy young communards and their children stands before a log cabin somewhere in the foothills.
Half are smiling. Half aren't.
The cover proclaims, or warns: "The Youth Communes: new way of living confronts the U.S."
"Confronts" is an interesting choice of words, and it's easy to imagine middle-class couples scurrying to their windows to look for signs of the hippie invasion.
Truth is that it had been under way across the country for a few years – usually attributed to the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, a disdain of 1950s values, the abundance of recreational drugs and a new desire to head back to the land.
No one kept a tally of communes, but the 2004 book "Freedom and Unity: A History of Vermont" estimated that at least 100 reigned in this state in the decade after 1967.
"I would have to say the whole phenomenon burned itself out by the late '70s," says Ray Mungo, 61, who co-founded a commune called Total Loss Farm in Guilford. "By 1980, when Ronald Reagan became president, it was all over. We were defeated!"
Looking back 40 years to the Summer of Love and Golden Gate Park's Human Be-In, both catalysts for the back-to-the-land exodus, the hippie movement may seem little more than youthful folly to the non-baby boomer. But while nearly all the original Vermont communes and communards have vanished, their legacy remains in the state's green movement, farmers markets, food co-ops and alternative-energy pioneers. Arguably, much of Vermont's current character stems from its commune days.
You say commune …
Seventy-one-year-old Wavy Gravy (the Woodstock festival emcee, Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavor and founder of Hog Farm Commune in California) offers a startling statistic gleaned from a magazine article: "Let's get one thing straight," he says in his gravelly voice, "there are more communes in America now than there ever were in the '60s and '70s."
How can that be?
"Wavy Gravy is using the word 'communes' to mean 'intentional community,'" says Diana Leafe Christian, a North Carolina author of two books on this subject.
Christian explains that an intentional community is a group of people living with, adjacent to or near enough to one another to carry out their common purpose together. Under her definition, projects like Cobb Hill Cohousing in Hartland or the new Burlington Cohousing on East Avenue, which describes itself as a "participatory, eco-friendly, multi-generational neighborhood," could be considered communes.
To a Vermont communard of the '60s and '70s, the lifestyle meant a sharing of property, mixed with equal portions of good karma, brown rice, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. In short, it was an extended middle finger for the man.
For many, it was an experiment that worked, at least for a while.
Some of the original communes or intentional communities continue to this day in altered forms, including Guilford's Monteverdi Artists Collaborative (originally Total Loss Farm). The authors of "Freedom and Unity" also cite The Tail of the Tiger in Barnet (a Tibetan Buddhist community founded in the late '60s) and Rochester's Quarry Hill Creative Center (an artists and writers retreat founded in the late '40s).
Plainfield's New Hamburger Community is still largely intact.
Sharing work, income
"Commune dwellers are as suspicious of journalists as they are of the rest of society they have deliberately abandoned," wrote Life magazine in 1969. The dozen or so members of the 60-acre New Hamburger Community, founded in 1970, didn't want to be interviewed or photographed for this article, according to one original member who spoke for them. That representative, Barney Carlson, provided written information instead.
Carlson says that New Hamburger was founded on the principles of group ownership of all land and buildings, decision-making by consensus, and the sharing of work and income. Only the latter has changed.
"Initially, everyone was individually responsible to contribute what they could: some working more on the land growing food or building housing, others working out in the larger community bringing in income. Over several years, this system was changed over so that each member was responsible for an equal share of the work and expenses necessary for yearly maintenance and operation of the community."
Carlson says gardening plays an important part at New Hamburger and always has.
"There have always been one or more good-sized cooperative gardens, not to mention the planting of fruit trees and the occasional small patch of rye or wheat. Raising animals has also been an ongoing activity."
But not all Vermont communards were adept at agriculture; many were from urban areas. So not all communes were geared around that lifestyle.
Turning on, dropping out
In the southern Vermont town of Guilford in 1970, 23-year-old photographer Peter Simon (brother of Carly Simon) purchased 80 acres for $60,000 and established Tree Frog Farm. Although Tree Frog communards dabbled in agriculture, Simon says it was impossible to live off the land exclusively: "We didn't have the skills or the work ethic to get down and dirty and just make money off the land."
Simon, who now lives on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, has mixed emotions about the commune days that served as his transition between college life and adult life. "I had to make a choice between living the life of a Boston photojournalist versus tuning in, turning on, dropping out and living off the lay of the land. It seemed like the people that were doing that at the time were happier and healthier."
He says that while he wanted Tree Frog to be a commune, in reality he was a landlord with tenants who didn't pay rent.
"It was still a fun experience in living," says Simon, 60, "but it was kind of sad. I was following the call of Ray Mungo, who had done the same thing just down the road."
'It's not free love'
Mungo and others had pooled their money for the down payment on Total Loss Farm in 1968. They had been college journalists together. "We were kind of the literary hippies," Mungo says with a laugh. "We also thought we were better than the other hippies."
Some communes would let anyone in their doors. Total Loss Farm didn't.
"People would come to our door and say, 'Here we are!' and I would say, 'No, you're not.' They would say, 'What do you mean? What are you, a hypocrite? I thought it was free love.' 'No, it's not free love, and as a matter of fact, it's not free land either. I'm the owner, and I'm telling you to go away.'"
Personal friction within the commune setting wasn't unknown, he says. "There were a lot of little rivalries and sexual jealousies and changing of partners and things like that. And every time something like that happens, people would leave because they couldn't take the emotional strain."
Driven by unrequited love, Mungo himself left the farm after three years and now lives in Long Beach, Calif. First he made certain Total Loss Farm would retain its integrity by establishing the nonprofit Monteverdi Artists Collaborative. Poet Verandah Porche, one of the founding members of Total Loss Farm, still lives at the site.
The rules: No rules!
The granddaddy of all Vermont communes could be considered Earth People's Park, the 592-acre site where the Woodstock Nation found a home in the Northeast Kingdom town of Norton, thanks to the Hog Farm Commune and others who raised money for a down payment.
"For 20 years a lot of people had their first confrontation with Mother Nature" there, says Wavy Gravy (real name: Hugh Romney).
"It was a place where everybody could go and just be themselves," recalls 68-year-old Rod Clark of Cape Coral, Fla., who homesteaded there with his wife and five kids from 1971 to '72.
The rules, says Clarke, were that there would be no rules. "It was kind of an anarchy. It suited me."
As a 32-year-old reporter for United Press International in Montpelier, Clarke first visited the park in 1971 on assignment. He decided to stay, though he never considered himself part of the group or the hippie movement. His purpose, he explains, was to prove that he could take his family out into the woods and survive.
The Clarkes lived alone in an 8-by-33-foot trailer without electricity or running water.
"I do remember there were community dinners and so forth, but we didn't participate in that," says Clarke's 42-year-old daughter, Lorelei Lissor, who was 8 at that time.
She also remembers people helping each other.
And the nudity.
"Oh, there were naked people everywhere. I remember my grandmother coming and seeing the naked women. She was pretty straight-laced. She thought they should put a top on because 'they were going to sag when they got older.'"
Earth People's Park made it into the '90s, though it had been marred by drug use and violence. "It was really nice and mellow until these biker guys came in with guns," says Wavy Gravy. The federal government seized the land eventually. It is now Black Turn Brook State Forest.
'So different now'
As Mungo has said, Vermont's commune scene was pretty much over by the late '70s. The Vietnam War ended in 1975, and with many of the old causes won, lost or abandoned, many erstwhile communards returned to the cities or blended into their adopted communities.
"I sort of wish my kids had grown up in an era like that," Lissor says of her adult daughter and son.
"It's so different now. Could a 20-year-old now live in a communal setting? I don't think so. I don't think the average 20-year-old could. But I think they all should have to, quite frankly."
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