The Farm, Intentional Community and Memories of a Monday Night Class

The picture above is a composite I made from the website of The Farm. Few intentional communities from the sixties counterculture's "communal" experiments survive until the present day. The Farm.in Summerland, Tennessee is a notable exception.

My first real girlfriend was named Sandy. We first got together at her apartment in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Fransisco in the Winter of 1968. The first time we made love was on LSD.

I will always remember events from that first week we spent together up there. One in particular that stands out is the Monday night we went to a "free class" in the Straight Theater, an old movie theater on lower Haight St that had been turned into a venue for community meetings and events. The man who taught the class was Stephen Gaskin who had previously taught at SFSU (then San Fransisco State College) The Grateful Dead wrote a song about Gaskin called St. Stephen.

This Monday Night Class filled with "acid freaks" who wanted to find better ways of tripping. There was also a sense among the group that they would like to get out of the city and find a better way of living.

A few years after my first visit to the class (I would return several times in the next year or so), the group that assembled around Gaskin and the class left San Francisco in a caravan of buses to find someplace to form a community.

After a lot of looking around, they bought some land near Summertown, Tennessee and started The Farm. Over three decades, it appears to be thriving. They are even up for visitors!