Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs

by John Thomas Codman

The "Associationists" were not united. The centre of the movement was at New York, and from there great stories of the advancement of the North American Phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey, went forth. It was Greeley's pet. It was the favorite at the centre and mostly with the doctrinaires. It was an excellent domain, with water power, splendid fruit-growing land, sufficiently near New York market for an undoubted sale of all its products. Greeley admired the talent and the social life at Brook Farm, but he thought that the leaders engaged at the North American Phalanx had a more practical turn, and their soil was wonderfully better fitted for farming, which always seems to be the hobby of reformers. It was near to him; he could visit it often, and he invested money in it.

It was intimated that the Brook Farm experiment had better stop, and that all the material that was good should be transferred to the North American. But it is easily seen that this was impossible, and that the experiment must go on. The leaders and members had pledged themselves too faithfully to carry out the Association's ideas, and none among them would be bold enough to announce such a project. It would seem like selling out to another organization. Who would dare to propose to break into the charmed circle by such discordant words? And so it went on.

Much talent was used in the school. As the Association took to itself a variety of industries; as it added shoemakers, carpenters and farmers to its original stock of intellectual workers, a change took place in the selectness of its society. Although the members were chosen by the organization, yet "practical" farmers, and "practical" shoemakers, with their wives and children, are not supposed to have the easy grace of manners, the elegant language and the fluency and charm of cultivated and scholarly men and women. The little, scarcely organized Community had increased into a goodly number, so that its dining room was like a small hotel; and it was no longer held by the "Transcendentalists," but had become a portion of a large and increasing body of men who followed the wild ideas of a Frenchman named Fourier, and called itself the Brook Farm Phalanx.

And who was this Fourier? It was just at this time; it was just as this question was asked by anxious mothers, that the slanders of the New York Press, copied into other papers, far and wide, worked mischief to the Brook Farm School. I never knew a pupil who was not pleased and delighted with the school; but the mother who sends a child away from home to an educational institution, especially if the child is a girl, will send it where there are no intimations connected with it of the character of those brought so prominently forward by the New York newspapers. It matters not so much to her that she believes the stories are slanders; her duty seems plain to take no risks.

The "Association" or "Phalanx" now overlapped the school, and it could no longer have the prominence as an industry that it did at first. The school, from being so intimately connected with the Association, began to lose caste. Although conducted with as much talent as ever, and with as much devotion on the part of its teachers, from the fact of the unfortunate odium cast on it, and its peculiar surroundings, was declining, and the high talent, the culture and the knowledge of its teachers, could not retain it in its proud position.

Thus I have gathered together, as in a bouquet, the sources of all the income of the once famous "Brook Farm." How slight they were!

It has often been stated that Brook Farm was a well chosen location for the experiment made there. It was nine miles from Boston. There were no surrounding industries. There was no water power at hand, the little brook being too small for any purpose but ornament. There was no available railroad station—the nearest was four miles away. This necessitated the teaming of lumber, fertilizers, coal, family stores and all stock for manufacturing purposes, from Boston, as it was not practical to send part way by rail and transfer it to teams. A portion of the time we were obliged to go to the city by the way of West Roxbury Village, as the nearest way—over the hills—was blocked by snow during our long New England winters, and this increased the distance. One or two teams, with men, were ever on the road. This was expensive and tedious.

After the manufacturing stock had been teamed thus far into the country, it was carted back in the shape of goods over the same road. I must praise the men who were engaged in this business, for they were not only teamsters, but errand boys—expressmen we would call them now—as well as purchasers of provender and general commercial agents of the Association; and their combined tasks were hard and difficult. Busy, driving Glover Drew and Buckley Hastings filled this office faithfully and long.

For the original purpose of an industrial school the farm was attractive, but for an experiment such as was foreshadowed by the name Phalanx, the place was not at all fitted, and the good sense of Mr. Greeley saw that the domain of the North American Phalanx was vastly superior.

In this connection I am reminded that there was but little machinery invented and employed on farms at the date of my narrative; and although our agriculturists, in spite of the stale jokes that have been fathered on them, were in the advance in this department as in others, it was only in the third or fourth year of their occupancy of the farm that they deemed it wise or prudent to purchase a horse rake, and I recall no other modern implement used, unless it was a seed drill, taken on trial. It was the same in the domestic department; there was not even a dish washer or a clothes wringer, and the most extensive and valuable aid in the laundry was a pounding barrel in which the soiled clothes were placed and put under discipline.