Brook Farm

Brook Farm, cooperative community established in 1841 in West Roxbury (now part of Boston) as a joint-stock company by leaders of the philosophical movement known as transcendentalism. Directed by the American critic and social reformer George Ripley, the community was organized as the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education on a farm of nearly 80 hectares (200 acres). The members of the group were to contribute equally to the work and to share equally in the proceeds from the work and from the social and educational opportunities. Among the American literary and religious leaders associated with Brook Farm were Amos Bronson Alcott, William Ellery Channing, Charles Anderson Dana, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Parker, and Orestes Augustus Brownson. In 1843 the community came under the influence of Albert Brisbane , an American advocate of the theories of the French socialist Charles Fourier. For two years the community was known as the Brook Farm Phalanx and was one of the headquarters of the Fourierist movement in the United States. From 1845 to 1849 the Brook Farm community published a weekly newspaper, the Harbinger. In 1846 the central building, or phalanstery, burned, and the community was abandoned in 1847. Brook Farm was the setting of a novel by Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852).