The founding of ‘The Farm’ in Tennessee
Georgia poet and author Rupert Fike and I lived in the San Francisco Bay area during the 1970s in a time of social renaissance and spiritual awakening. He was with a core group community of some 300 young activists and idealists. The earliest beginnings of this community go back to San Francisco and a weekly meeting called Monday Night Class.
Young people of the counterculture movement would gather weekly to discuss spiritual values and the vision of a new society. The focal point and facilitator for these meetings was Stephen Gaskin, a creative writing teacher from San Francisco State University who left his position to play an active role in the changing times. Gaskin was invited by a group of ministers to hold a series of talks in churches throughout the United States.
Over 200 others came along, forming a line of 60 school buses on a transcontinental odyssey that became known as “The Caravan.” The Caravan ended in San Francisco, leaving its participants with the question, “What next?”
The obvious answer was to acquire land and build the community of their ideals. And this is just what they did, acquiring land in Tennessee and creating a makeshift utopia that they named “The Farm.”
Fike tells his personal history of creating The Farm in his new book “All Things in Common” (Red Hen Press, 2025), in personable prose-like poems that read like a lively conversation among friends. I was immediately drawn into the book in the first poem “Convergence, 1968,” which is a poetic three-page history of both of our experiences in San Francisco, beginning with a quote from Jim Morrison (lead singer for the Doors), “The West is the best ...Get here, we’ll do the rest,” and with mention of Dharma Bums, the Beats (Snyder, Ginsberg) and “gurus, dancing Sufis and hash-huffing fakirs.”
From here, Fike and friends set out to the east coincidentally around the same time I did — with me, landing in Western North Carolina and them landing in eastern Tennessee, only a few miles apart. At this point, the poems go into detail about the everyday business of creating a large commune literally from scratch with little or no experience in off-the-grid, self-sufficient living, which I was doing at the same time in a similar way just over the Appalachian Mountains in Polk County. In poems such as “Maggie May” (after an old Rod Stewart song), Fike writes: “in fallow fields for our/sorghum crop — Old Beatnik syrup both a cash-flow hope/and PR strategy — we would raise cane, cook molasses,/turn a profit and somehow come off as ‘down home.’/ Budding capitalists living Marxist ideals, that was us.”
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Fike goes on with his lighthearted description of the early life of The Farm. “We were full of ourselves, full of caffeinated sodas,/ buzzed on weed, always trying to ‘straighten’ each other, /each of us a participant in this game of altruistic chicken.” In the poem “Ode to the Land” Fike gives credit where credit is due: “We casually said we’d ‘bought’ these acres when really/ they’d forever been part of the Chickasaw nation/ before they got sent on their long walk and who named/ these ridges for their habit of pulling lightning from the sky.” In “Slab Shack,” Fike describes the living quarters in those early years: “... in the house/that wasn’t much of a house at all, /just some salvaged tin nailed over walls/built from vertical planks of bark, slab wood,/the first cuts off logs at our neighbor’s sawmill.” Fike describes their living quarters kitchen as “a hippie kitchen where grain was stored in bags.” And then there is one of my favorite poems in the book, “VW Bug Pumps Water,” a poem whose title speaks for itself.
As for the social scene, I like Fike’s honesty in articulating about situations and the people. In describing one of the young people wanting to join the commune, he writes: “She was too college-snobby for hippie-chick Jill. For this place.” As The Farm grew in functionality and in notoriety, it became known nationally as a place where pregnant girls and young women could come for free birthing procedures that included adoption by the commune if a young would-be parent didn’t want to or couldn’t keep their newborns. Then there are poems about their conservatively political evangelical Tennessee neighbors and “Repent, The End is Near” road signs along the highways and the kinds of confrontations that ensued. And then, stories like “the 14-year-old from Chicago, pretty much dumped here by his mother, a speed-loving lap-dancer who read about us, drove here and left him at the Gate with slurred promises to return.”
With all their social offerings as they progressed there at The Farm and in papers like the Wall Street Journal, headlines would appear such as “In Trouble? Call a Hippie!” in reference to programs The Farm was offering, such as psychological counseling, a free ambulance service and eventually to world-wide relief for countries and communities in need of help. As Fike describes himself and the young members of his community: “we who had volunteered to be modern-day serfs,/fashion-forward peasants with a vision.” The Farm still exists today, and in “All Things in Common,” Rupert Fike takes us back and forward at the same time, showing us how the past can also create the future.
(Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally published and recognized author of more than 30 books, including the multi-award winning nonfiction nature memoir Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods.)
