LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Brook Farm: George Ripley
built 265 days ago
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.
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Brook Farm officially declared itself a Fourierist Phalanx in 1845. Ripley then established The Harbinger, 1845-49, a periodical devoted to the exposition of Associationist theory. That being said Ripley remained committed to the project continuing to have a religious dimension.
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Brook Farm is one of America's most famous utopian experiments. Located on a 200-acre dairy farm in Roxbury, Massachusetts, it was founded in 1841, a time of social ferment for women's rights, abolition, and workers' rights. George Ripley, a Unitarian minister who felt constrained by traditional religion and was enamored of the budding transcendentalist movement, started the farm, where all the residents were expected to join equally in manual labor and intellectual pursuits. Days of laboring in the fields began with classical music and ended with dramatic plays. Supporters included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller. Despite considerable enthusiasm for the project, it failed after six years, primarily due to financial stress.
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As Brook Farm's community grew, so too the need for more lodging. "The Nest," a small house located across the narrow road, was the second building erected. This building served as the school building and guest quarters. In 1842 they built a third building, which was not very solidly constucted, on the Farm's highest point. The house was called the Eyrie, and housed most of the single people and the Ripley’s. The next building erected was the Cottage, Margaret Fuller's Cottage.
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This is the site of the 1840s Brook Farm experimental commune of Transcendentalists including Hawthorne, Dana, Greeley, Ripley, Margaret Fuller, and others. It was used briefly in the 1850s as a poor farm and in 1861 for training at Camp Andrew during the Civil War. A Lutheran orphanage occupied the farm from 1872 through 1943, with a treatment center on site from 1948 through 1974. Gethsemane Cemetery was established in 1873. Land was going to be developed into high-rises, before the MDC took over in 1988.
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George Ripley founded and created Brook Farm, but before the formation of the community, Ripley lived in the city of 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 Norton's traditionalism and Emerson's decision to leave the church. 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, Ripley set out to find his own church to which he could be honest and faithful.
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George Ripley