John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

At the time of this new evolution in Brook Farm, there were several communities or associations in different parts of the country organized very much on our original plan. There was the North American Phalanx, so called, in New Jersey, twenty miles from New York; the Ontario Phalanx, in northern New York; there was one in Ohio, and there were several others. But none of them was successful; they did not pay. So we at Brook Farm made the change we had so long considered. We got an act of the legislature incorporating the Brook Farm Phalanx, and our whole society was merged into this new establishment. We began again with hope. We got some new capital and we took in new members and added some new branches of industry-shoemaking, carpentry, work in britannia metal, and so on. But after a year or two we found that the business was not going profitably enough, and we went to work to erect a new building. We were now a phalanx, as Fourier's association is called. The habitation of a phalanx is a phalanstery, and we put into ours the last cent we had. Well, one night the whole thing took fire and burned up. And there was one unpleasant fact about it. I was at the head of the financial department, and I was away at the time in New York, and the one thing that we were most ashamed of was that the insurance expired the day before the fire and hadn't been renewed. But the faith of the majority of the members was not shaken. The faith of Mr. Ripley especially, a philosopher of the first order, was just as firm, and he was just as firmly convinced of the truth of the associative theory when he saw the building go up in smoke as he was before; he was just as certain then as when he laid the foundations. But after the building was burned up we had no longer the means of taking new pupils or introducing new industries and creating new revenues for ourselves. When we came to make up our accounts for the year we found we had taken in considerable money, and we had spent all but one thousand dollars of it. There were about seventy people in the establishment, including the members, children, and students, and certainly one thousand dollars wouldn't carry us through the next year.