The Farm :: Summertown, TN

Ellie was a colorful elephant at the edge of the jungle. As the only patch of color in a sea of gray, she was understandably quite self-conscious. Luckily, she had charisma and a wild sense of humor.

The other elephants loved Ellie’s jokes, but still she felt like an outcast. One day, she figured out how to disguise herself by rubbing her body around in elephant colored berries. After finally seeing through the ruse, the elephants erupted in celebration. They all decorated themselves in Ellie colors while Ellie was dressed in elephant color. The parade was beautiful, marching boldly forward to the music of The Beatles.

The kids were absolutely adorable, wearing those foam wacky noodles strapped on their noses for little trunks and constantly forgetting their lines. They were all dressed in drab gray, except for one little girl who wore tie-dye. Parents gave a standing ovation, aiming camcorders and flashing cameras at the stage. As the two-piece jam band began their set, parents slowly dispersed, disposing of several untouched burritos in the compost bucket. Meanwhile, the film crew from Animal Planet hovered in the back, aggressively trying to angle their way into The Farm’s more juicy pockets for a possible reality show.

This used to be a hippie commune. One of the first established, all the way back in 1971, when Stephen Gaskin came over to Tennessee in the aftermath of the Haight’s collapse with his caravan of flower kids. In its second year, the population shot up to over a thousand, and 10,000 visitors or so came through a year. Gaskin was the guru and leader of the community, and it wasn’t until 1983 that an uprising of sorts dethroned him, establishing an elected council. Called ‘the exodus,’ the period is a sensitive subject around here. In a new environment where people had to support themselves financially rather than putting their funds into a collective central bank, droves of people with no viable income moved out. Gaskin now mostly keeps to himself, secluded in his home on property, and the population lingers below 200. The Farm website describes it as a gated community.

Behind the gates lies a store, a school, a few social areas, plenty of garden space, some businesses, and homes spotted all around private roads traversed by cars and golf carts. The midwifery center is one of the most highly regarded in the world. It feels like a little high-tech village with plenty of beautiful fields and hiking trails spotted throughout. As an intentional community, people who live on The Farm property now pay dues and go through rigorous bureaucratic processes in order to build or work with their parcel. Many never get approval for more radical ideas. Even some of the most obvious hippie paraphernalia, like composting toilets, get denied.

The people who live here seem to love it, but many expressed anxiety to us about the younger generation picking up where they leave off. There’s an eerie generation gap here. In the four days we spent here, we met several people in their 20s and early 30s who moved to The Farm and were put off by the politics and conservative nature of the place. The result has been a collection of individual houses and homesteads spotted around the area where people have the luxury of being near the community but the ability to develop as they see fit, and as the original hippies here once did.

When telling people we were going to pass through The Farm, we got a lot of snickers and smirks. It seems it’s widely gained a reputation of being a hippie retirement community or country club. A museum of sorts where you can sit down for hours hearing stories about the good old days. It does feel a bit like a ghost town, and plenty of people are living out their golden years here. It’s pretty easy to poke fun at the place for what it’s become, but there are merits. They do garden vegetables, use solar panels, and live much more consciously than your average gated-community dweller. And we met at least one person in their 20′s (one of the four on the property we’re told) who has high hopes for the future of The Farm. It’s gone through many incarnations since its inception, and maybe we’ll be back one day to tell a fuller story. But for now it’s rather endearing to see hippies retiring in relative luxury, and to see that fire possess their eyes when they talk about the ideals that gave birth to the place 40 years ago.