Why communes appealed
Living together was one of the clearest ways that hippies tried to act on their values. Sharing a house, a kitchen and money was a rejection of the nuclear family home and of private property, and it was also cheap. Communal living took many forms, from a rented house in the city shared by a dozen people to rural farms with their own rules, leaders and religious ideas. Estimates of how many communes existed around 1970 vary widely, and any single figure should be treated with caution because many were small and short-lived.
Drop City, Colorado
Drop City, near Trinidad in southern Colorado, is usually named as one of the first rural hippie communes. It was founded in 1965 by a group of art students and artists, among them Gene Bernofsky, JoAnn Bernofsky, Clark Richert and Richard Kallweit. They built their homes from scrap materials, including car roofs and salvaged wood, in the form of geodesic domes, a design associated with the engineer Buckminster Fuller.
Drop City attracted a lot of attention in 1966 and 1967, partly because of its art events and partly because visitors began arriving in large numbers, a trend that grew with the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967. The founders have said that the flood of visitors, some of whom did not contribute, wore on the community, and the original group had largely moved on by around 1970. The site stayed in use by others for a time afterwards. Its influence outlasted it, since it inspired many later rural communes and was one of the reasons Colorado and New Mexico became known for them.
Morning Star Ranch and the open land idea
In Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, Morning Star Ranch was started in the mid-1960s by Lou Gottlieb, a musician who had been a member of the folk group the Limeliters. He opened the land to anyone who wanted to come, on the principle that land should not be owned, an idea close in spirit to the Digger politics of free goods and shared property in San Francisco. The result was a steady stream of residents and visitors, with basic shelter and food shared as far as it could be.
The experiment ran into trouble with county officials over sanitation and building rules, and Gottlieb went through legal battles in the late 1960s. By the early 1970s the ranch had effectively been closed as a commune. Morning Star is often remembered as a test of how far open-door idealism could go in practice, and as a lesson in why most communes eventually adopted some kind of membership rules.
The Hog Farm
The Hog Farm began in the mid-1960s in California around Hugh Romney, who later took the name Wavy Gravy. It started as a household that included a number of friends and travellers and became known for its willingness to take part in events, from cooking for large crowds to calming people who were having bad drug experiences.
The Hog Farm is best known for its role at the Woodstock festival in August 1969, where members helped with free food and looked after festivalgoers. The group later moved to rural locations and kept going in various forms over the following decades, and it became better known for its performance, charity work and camps than for anything resembling a strict commune.
The Farm in Tennessee
The Farm was founded by Stephen Gaskin, a former university lecturer who gathered a large following in San Francisco through his “Monday Night Class” discussions. In 1970 and 1971 Gaskin and a few hundred followers travelled across the United States in a caravan of converted buses, and they then settled on land in Lewis County, Tennessee, where they built what they called The Farm.
The Farm differed from most communes of its time in being more structured, with shared work, a stated moral code, a nonviolent ethic and a vegetarian diet. It became known for its midwifery and for the book “Spiritual Midwifery”, and it ran a public ambulance service for a period. The community went through a financial crisis in the early 1980s and shifted away from full communal ownership, but a smaller community still exists on the land.
How long communes lasted
Looking across these examples, a pattern emerges. Most communes of the American counterculture lasted only a few years. Drop City and Morning Star lasted only a handful of years in their original form. The Hog Farm and The Farm endured longer, partly because they became more organised and partly because they developed ways of making money and welcoming outsiders on their own terms.
Commonly reported reasons for failure included:
- too many visitors and too few people willing to do the daily work
- disputes over leadership, money and decision-making
- lack of farming experience and unreliable income
- pressure from local authorities and neighbours
- the difficulty of raising children and sustaining relationships in a shared space
Not every experiment failed, and some communal households, co-operatives and intentional communities have continued for decades. The broader legacy was probably less about rural utopias than about shared houses, food co-ops, small businesses run by hippie entrepreneurs and the idea that a group of friends might live together by choice.