Commune (intentional Community) - Notable Examples of Communes

Notable Examples of Communes

• The Farm, Summertown, Tennessee. Collective begun by 300 hippies, May, 1971. The biggest, most-storied American commune, 1,764 acres, 1,500 residents, vegan diet and midwifery pioneers. See Voluntary Peasants, by Melvyn Stiriss, a founder and 13-year resident.
• The Harmony Society started by Johann Georg Rapp in Harmony, Pennsylvania, in 1804 and dissolving around 1905 in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, was one of the longest-running financially successful communes in American history.

• Brook Farm in Massachusetts existed from 1841 to 1847. Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the commune's founders, fictionalized his experience in the novel The Blithedale Romance (1852).

• Fruitlands was a commune founded in 1843 by Amos Bronson Alcott in Harvard, Massachusetts. The tempo of life in this Transcendentalist community is recorded by Alcott's daughter, Louisa May Alcott, in her piece "Transcendental Wild Oats."

• The Oneida Community was a commune that lasted from 1848 to 1881 in Oneida, New York. Although this utopian experiment is better known today for its manufacture of Oneida silverware, it was one of the longest-running communes in American history.

• The commune Modern Times was formed in 1851 in Long Island.

• The Amana Colonies were communal settlements in Iowa which lasted from 1855 to 1932.

• The anarchist Home Colony was formed in 1895 across the Puget Sound from Tacoma, Washington on Key Peninsula, and lasted until 1919.

• The Twin Oaks Community is a commune that was founded in 1967; it continues to thrive.

• Ganas is an on-going commune in the New Brighton neighborhood of Staten Island, New York.

• The Latin Settlements by German freethinkers mostly in rural, south central Texas in the mid-19th century.

• The Cecilia Community in Brazil, an anarchist community founded by Italian immigrants around the start of the 20th century in the southern region of Brazil.

• The Brotherhood of the Spirit/Renaissance Community, created by Michael Metelica in 1968 and lasting until 1988, was the largest commune in the northeast United States.

• Jesus People USA (JPUSA), started in 1972 and based in Chicago, Illinois' Uptown area, is perhaps the largest urban commune in the United States, and is still strongly flavored by its hippie / 60s roots.

• Kalakuta Republic (Nigeria), was the name musician and political activist Fela Kuti gave to the communal compound that housed his family, band members, and recording studio. The compound burned to the ground in 1977 after an assault by a thousand armed soldiers