John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

It was in the spring of 1841 that Mr. Ripley and his friends determined to buy a farm of two hundred and odd acres in West Roxbury, about eight miles from Boston. It was a very pretty piece of land, most excellently situated, well watered, and not a bad soil — a very eligible place. They organized a society called the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, and began work. This organization was conceived in Transcendentalism, and designed to carry on social life in accordance with democratic and Christian ideas. There had been all the time a notable agitation respecting the unsanitary habits of college students, of people who pursued literature and learning. They used to sit in their studies and get no regular exercise, and had no life in nature; they did not go out in the free air and gain their livelihood by the sweat of their brows. The argument was that while any one was pursuing philosophy and literature and philology and mathematics, he ought to work on the land, to cultivate the earth; and the man who didn't work on the land could not have first-rate health. This was their position. So, in order to reform society, in order to regenerate the world, in order to realize democracy in the social relations, these friends of ours determined that their society should first pursue agriculture, which would give every man plenty of out-door labor in the free air, and at the same time the opportunity of study, of instruction, of becoming familiar with everything in literature and in learning. So they began the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education. They went out in the spring and took possession of their farm. Next to Mrs. Ripley and Mr. Ripley, the most distinguished person who went with them was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He had also adopted the idea that he would like to work out-doors. He had got tired of the routine of literary life in his study, and of the more tedious routine of official life in the Salem custom-house; and so he started in by advancing money towards buying the farm along the brook.

A large majority of the Brook-Farmers were literary people or of literary associations, but there were people of other callings among them, too. There was a pressman and a grocer, each with his family. Several had been farmers'