Buying the Farm: Peace and War on a Sixties Commune

Preface

M xi N PREFACE N Buying the Farm tells the timely story of Montague Farm, a commune founded in 1968, one of the first of a wave of shared farms and alternative communities that swept the country, garnering national attention and becoming hallmarks of the era. Montague proved exceptional in that it survived in roughly its original form for the following thirty-five years. The chapters that follow chronicle the role of several key characters —from the farm’s founder, who lived only a year into its mortgage, to the self-serving local organic farmers who for a lengthy period took it over, to the farm’s beleaguered trustees who eventually had to sell it. Later, the focus shifts to the core group of farm family members most involved in determining the long-range future of the farm. Charting the interaction of these personalities, the story moves from the more familiar colorful trappings and passionate ideals of the 1960s into a present in which the former farmers and their home face a new set of challenges. These changes and the way the community reacts to them offer some important lessons on the difficult task of living out our ideals. What were the ideals of the 1960s? How did small independent groups like Montague Farm help put them into action? What were the forces that kept such groups together, or divided them? What was the experience of such experimental enterprises for those who participated xii N PREFACE in them? Did the ideals survive to influence the world around them? These are the sorts of questions posed by Buying the Farm. Drawing on my own experience as a resident of Montague Farm, on decades of contact with the farm’s extended family, and on the considerable writing about this period—from notes of farm-family members to memoirs, novels, and academic studies in the history of the time—I have tried to bring alive an era of contemporary history and to link it both to its consequences in the present and the future, and to its roots in the past. It must be said that writing about a number of figures and a period of several decades has obvious pitfalls. The full story of the farm has been difficult to assemble and some of the individuals and specifics hard to pin down. This book is thus the closest I have been able to come to expressing my views of those people and those years; my interpretation is intended to hew as closely as possible to the events I observed. Generally, in this book, public figures are fully named, while others , or those with lesser roles, may not be. The reason for the first is to preserve the story’s genuine ties to history; for the second, to protect the privacy of those not seeking such prominent roles. Regarding my own involvement, I came to Montague, as many did, more or less by chance. Attracted by rural life, I accepted the invitation of a friend to move to a farm for my final term of college. I ended up staying more than four years. By that time, and no longer by chance, the farm and its family had achieved a permanent place in my life. The book that follows is the story of that farm. BUYING THE FARM N “This page intentionally left blank” What god was it then set them together in bitter collision? Iliad, Book 1 N ...