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The Cool Cats from The Farm

Thirty years ago, a bunch of hippies carved a utopia out of the badlands of the American State of Tennessee. It became the biggest hippie commune in the world. SSUK recently spent time visiting the place.

Text: Marco Barneveld Photos: David Frohman and Ocean Christopherson

The Farm: back in the old days

Stephen and his followers believe that if no money is involved in dealing weed, that the weed is untainted and therefore purer.

The year, nineteen hundred and seventy one. It must have been a sight for stoned eyes! One hundred and fifty school busses converted into caravans and all fantastically painted in bright colours and psychedelic imagery. A slow moving forward rolling convoy of three hundred hippies waving as they moved in a 20km long procession along the highway. It must have seemed a procession without end to the average Americans living in the small towns along the way, for whenever the convoy stopped, everyone would come out to see this strange sight from that hippie paradise, San Francisco. Frequently the local service station would run dry before the last bus in the convoy had a chance to fill up. But what was the purpose of the procession? This group of people were on their way to establish their own community – a utopia wherever they could find a good piece of ground at an affordable price. That was the start of The Farm.

We arrive in Summertown in Lewis County, just about 60km’s further down the road from that Country and Western capital – Nashville, Tennessee. This hilly landscape is also home to trailer trash and red necks and their trailer camps are littered with broken sofas and ‘Jesus loves You’ hoarding alongside the endless number of car wrecks. A kilometre further up and an Amish farmer walks barefoot behind his horse, his hands tilling the plough. And twenty kilometres further is the heart of the infamous order of white pointy hats and sheets or the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan as they are otherwise known. The Stars and Stripes flap languidly from poles all over the homeland. “This is the real America”, the almost toothless serviceman hawks up whilst emitting a stream of chewing tobacco. It was in this rough terrain, dotted with illegal distilleries for Moonshine, that the hippie caravan came to a halt. They decided to call this piece of earth home and it certainly was a good place. That the neighbours were known to take pot shots at each other occasionally was not an obstacle. Live and let be.

Today The Farm covers an easy ten square kilometres and contains virgin woods, streams, caves, ponds, orchards and a number of large fields.

Ex-marine

It had all started in San Francisco at the end of the Sixties. Stephen Gaskin, an ex-marine and veteran of the Korean War was teaching at the San Francisco State College. “I saw some of my best and most promising students dropping out one by one to go off and try to live alternatively.”

Out of pure curiosity, he decided to investigate and this proved to be his initiation into The Age of Aquarius, or The Hippie Ages.

He began to give lectures at the new Experimental College of San Francisco State. This faculty had been included and was the boon of the Sixties in that, as the name implies, academic experiments were undertaken with the new sciences. Stephen tried to aim his lectures at those hippies who had dropped out and so his subjects included world religions, telepathy, magic, parapsychology and had impressive titles such as, ‘North American White Witchcraft’, ‘Magic, Einstein and God’, or ‘Group Experiments in Unified Field Theory’. The lectures became so successful that new premises had to be found to accommodate the numbers who attended. Word spread and Stephens classes simply became known as ‘Monday Night Class’, because that was always the evenings on which they were given. Every week as many as a thousand or more people would regularly attend the classes. They took on the character of almost religious meetings and Gaskin was soon seen to be the spiritual leader of this large group of young people. During the famous Summer of Love in 1969, the American Academy of Religion held their annual conference in San Francisco and many of the conference visitors also came to the Monday Night Classes. They were so impressed with Stephen and his ideas that they invited him to come and talk about it at various venues all over the States. Stephen was living in a converted school bus at the time and decided to use it whilst making his lecture tour and then extended an invitation to any and all who wished to come along on the ‘peace mission’. And so the Caravan came into existence.

Of course it had to happen and indeed it did, before the convoy had even reached the edge of California State, they were all arrested. The stories of an enormous group of hippies heading through the country in busses reached the ears of the police rather quickly. At the border the longhaired bunch was stopped and searched and large quantities of weed were found, “Kilo’s of weed were seized,” laughs Stephen, “everyone’s stash was completely wiped out.” But Stephen was the only one who was arrested. He explained to the judge that they were all on a peace mission, that they themselves were pacifist, smoked weed and ingested other psychedelic substances and that they were totally against hard drugs like cocaine, heroin, speed and suchlike.”

The judge’s answer, “We will be watching your caravan and we shall see what happens” and so the case was postponed and the convoy of smokers could continue on their journey.

The tour lasted for four months and once the people were back in San Francisco, they found that they had become inseparable. After a couple of weeks, the group decided to continue on down to Tennessee and to start a collective farm in order to practice their theories. But before they could leave they still had to deal with the delayed court case. As soon as they appeared before the judge, it became apparent that he had indeed kept a close eye on their activities. His judgement, “It is scandalous that these good people have been brought before me” and issued Stephen with the minimal fine of $150 and the case was closed.