“Industry Without Drudgery”: Planning for Brook Farm

Background: In 1840, Unitarian minister George Ripley wrote to the Transcendentalist author Ralph Waldo Emerson in an (unsuccessful) effort to convince him to join, or at least invest in, his planned utopian community, Brook Farm. Brook Farm began operations in 1841 in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. The Brook farmers lived and dined communally, and divided their time between farm work and artistic and scholarly pursuits. Although other utopian communities, such as Oneida in upstate New York, and Amana, in Iowa, achieved self-sufficiency, Brook Farm ultimately failed. The community never recovered from a devastating fire in 1846, and it closed its doors in 1847.

My Dear Sir,—

. . . Our objects, as you know, are to insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists; to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual; to guarantee the highest mental freedom, by providing all with labor, adapted to their tastes and talents, and securing to them the fruits of their industry; to do away the necessity of menial services, by opening the benefits of education and the profits of labor to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life, than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions.

To accomplish these objects, we propose to take a small tract of land, which, under skillful husbandry, uniting the garden and the farm, will be adequate to the subsistence of the families; and to connect with this a school or college, in which the most complete instruction shall be given, from the first rudiments to the highest culture. Our farm would be a place for improving the race of men that lived on it; . . . we should have industry without drudgery, and true equality without its vulgarity. . . .

George Ripley

P. S. . . . let me suggest the inquiry, whether our Association should not be composed of various classes of men? . . . I think we should be content to join with others . . . whose gifts and abilities would make their services important. For instance, I should like to have a good washerwoman in my parish admitted into the plot. She is certainly not a Minerva or a Venus; but we might educate her two children to wisdom and varied accomplishments, who otherwise will be doomed to drudge through life. The same is true of some farmers and mechanics, whom we should like with us.

Source: George Ripley to Ralph Waldo Emerson, November 9, 1840, in O. B. Frothingham, George Ripley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1882), 307–312.