Buying the Farm: Peace and War on a Sixties Commune

About the Author, Back Cover

Tom Fels’s four years on a communal farm, from 1969 to 1973, form the background for Buying the Farm. After 1981 he became a full-time curator and writer. Some of his many exhibitions have appeared at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. In 1986 he was named a Chester Dale Fellow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 1998 a Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow of the Huntington Library. Mr. Fels currently pursues independent research and writing in culture and the arts, including the founding of the Famous Long Ago archive at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which focuses on the extended family of Montague Farm highlighted in Buying the Farm. His Farm Friends (2008), also on the extended farm family, was widely praised and received an Eric Hoffer award. He lives with his wife in North Bennington, Vermont. Daniel Aaron, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of English and American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University, is the author of Writers on the Left and numerous other works on American history and culture, and was founding president of the Library of America. In 2010 he received the National Humanities Medal, awarded for outstanding achievement in history, literature , education, and cultural policy. N “This page intentionally left blank” “This page intentionally left blank” “Elegantly written. An informative and worthwhile read.” —Tom Hayden “Tom Fels writes with eloquence, compassion, and ultimately wisdom about the mythical and magical place known as Montague Farm.” —Gary Goldberg Cover photo: Montague Farm, 1972, by Tom Fels UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS PRESS Amherst & Boston www.umass.edu/umpress T his book tells the story of Montague Farm, an early back-to-the land communal experiment in western Massachusetts, from its beginning in 1968 through the following thirty-five years of its surprisingly long life. Drawing on his own experience as a resident of the farm from 1969 to 1973 and decades of contact with the farm’s extended family, Tom Fels provides an insightful account of the history of this iconic alternative community. He follows its trajectory from its heady early days as a pioneering outpost of the counterculture through many years of change, including a period of renewed political activism and, later, increasing episodes of conflict between opposing factions to determine what the farm represented and who would control its destiny. With deft individual portraits, Fels reveals the social dynamics of the group and explores the ongoing difficulties faced by a commune that was founded in idealism and sought to operate on the model of a leaderless democracy. He draws on a large body of farm-family and 1960s-related writing and the notes of community members to present a variety of points of view. The result is an absorbing narrative that chronicles the positive aspects of Montague Farm while documenting the many challenges and disruptions that marked its history. = TOM FELS, a museum curator and writer, has for many years researched, written, and lectured on the history of the 1960s. His Farm Friends: From the Late Sixties to the West Seventies and Beyond (2008) received honorable mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award in independent publishing. ...