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Place Name
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Brook Farm
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Pronunciation
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bruk FAHRM
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Place Status (Type)
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historic site
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Location
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Massachusetts, United States, North America
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Latitude
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unknown
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Longitude
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unknown
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Brook Farm
(bruk FAHRM), an experimental utopian farm,
1841-1847, at West Roxbury (now part of Boston), Mass., based on
cooperative living. Founded by George Ripley, a Unitarian minister, the
farm was initially financed by a joint-stock company with 24 shares of
stock at $500 per share. Each member was to take part in the manual
labor in an attempt to make the group self-sufficient.
Intellectual life was stimulating, with such members as Nathaniel
Hawthorne, John S. Dwight, Charles A. Dana, and Isaac Hecker, and such
visitors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. Channing, Margaret Fuller,
Horace Greeley, and Orestes Brownson. Brook Farm was mainly an
outgrowth of Unitarianism, although most of the members had left that
church and were advocates of the literary and philosophical movement
known as Transcendentalism. Economically, the community's excellent
school was the most successful part of the venture (anticipating John
Dewey's progressive-education ideas of learning from experience); agr.
showed little profit because of the sandy soil and the inexperience of
the farmers. The popularity of the doctrines of Charles Fourier led,
especially through the efforts of Albert Brisbane, to Brook
Farm's conversion to a phalanx in 1844. The group, however, did not
long survive the financial disaster of the burning (1846) of the
uncompleted central bldg. The Harbinger (1845-1849), printed
at Brook Farm and edited by Ripley, was rather a Fourierist weekly
newspaper and was continued in N.Y. city with Parke Godwin as editor
after 1847.
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