BROOK FARM (1841-47), an institute of agriculture and education, situated on 16o ac. at West Roxbury (Mass.), 9m. from Boston, was organized in the summer of 1841 by the Rev. George Ripley, a former Unitarian minister, an editor of The Dial, a critical literary monthly, and a leader in the Transcendentalists club, an informal gathering of the intellectuals of the period and vi cinity. He was aided by his wife, Sophia Dana Ripley, a woman of wide culture and academic experience. According to the articles of agreement, their desire was to combine the thinker and the worker, to guarantee the highest mental freedom, to prepare a so ciety of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons whose relations with each other would permit a more wholesome and simple life than could be led amidst the pressure of competitive institutions. There was no religious creed. Truth, justice, and order were the governing principles. Each individual was free in so far as he did not violate the rights of others.
The project was financed by the sale of stock, a purchaser of one share becoming automatically a member of the institute. It was governed by a board of directors. The profits, if any, after all payments and improvements, were divided into a number of shares corresponding with the number of days' labour, every mem ber entitled to one share for each day's labour performed. Among the original shareholders were Charles A. Dana and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who served together as the first directors of agricul ture. Other members were John S. Dwight, Minot Pratt, George Partridge, Bradford and Warren Burton. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Orestes A. Bronson, and William Henry Channing were interested visitors. It attracted not only intellectuals—though teachers remained ever in excess of farmers—but carpenters, shoemakers, and printers. It paid a dollar a day for work (physical or mental) to men and to women, and provided to all members, their children and family dependents, housing, fuel, clothing and food at approximately actual cost. For four years it published The Harbinger, a weekly magazine devoted to social and political problems, to which James Russell Lowell, J. G. Whittier, and Horace Greeley occasionally contributed.
In educational theory it was modern, desiring "perfect freedom of intercourse between students and teaching body." For the first and second years disciplinary measures consisted in the attempt to arouse a sense of personal responsibility, and to communicate a passion for intellectual work. There were no prescribed study hours, and each student was required to give a few hours a day to manual labour—the girls to kitchen and laundry work, the boys to hoeing and chopping. There was an infant school, a primary school, a college preparatory course covering six years. Latin, Italian, German, moral philosophy, Greek, higher mathematics, botany, the English classics, music and drawing were taught, and during the brief period of existence it attracted students from Manila, Havana, and Florida. George William Curtis, Father Isaac Thomas Hecker, and Gen. Francis C. Barlow were early students there.
For a while it looked as though the ideal of the founders would have something of a practical realization. Within three years the community—or "Phalanx" as it was called after 1844—which had begun with the original farmhouse and a small building known as the school, had grown to include four houses, work rooms, and dormitories. Then, though financing had been a constant difficulty, it of necessity put all available funds into the construction of a large central building to be known as the Phalanstery, and the leaders were still optimistic of the permanence of their venture when on the night of March 2, 1846, while they celebrated with a dance the completion of the new building, the alarm was given that it was on fire. It burned to the ground, and though the colony struggled on for a while, "the enterprise faded, flickered, died down, and expired," and the land and buildings were sold at auc tion on April 13, 1849 See John Thomas Codman, Brook Farm (Boston, 1894) ; Linday Swift, Brook Farm (1900) ; and Morris Hillquit's History of Socialism in the United States (19o3).