Fruitlands, Massachusetts
Fruitlands was established in 1843 by Charles Lane and Amos Alcott. Fruitlands was Alcott’s idea, and the land upon which it operated was purchased with Lane’s money, as Alcott was without funds after the failure of a Temple School in Boston, where his teaching methods had aroused the ire of Bostonians. Alcott had denounced corporal punishment of children among other things, instead requiring the offending child to strike Alcott, thereby taking on the shame of violent behavior.
Lane’s money obtained about 90 acres in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts. Neither Lane nor Alcott referred to the property as being purchased or owned, instead the land for which they had exchanged Lane’s $1,800 was redeemed from the “…debasing state of proprium, or property, to divine uses…” The tract contained fewer than a dozen apple trees but the new owners – or redeemers – optimistically named their community Fruitlands.
About 14 residents including both Lane’s and Alcott’s families moved to Fruitlands in June. Both Lane and Alcott were transcendentalists, with Alcott espousing the belief that the world and its goods should be fully renounced to allow focus on the spirit. At Fruitlands, it was a general belief that denial of the body led to fullness of spirit. The utopians planted several acres in grain and vegetables.
To deny the body, the residents of Fruitlands were vegan, although that word was unknown to them. Unnatural light from candles or oil lamps was forbidden, as to place artificial light against natural darkness was a denial of God’s will. The only beverage allowed to the residents was water. Water used for the purpose of bathing was unheated. All work on the farm was by manpower alone, including plowing the fields to plant grain.
Not surprisingly, Fruitlands did not survive its first winter. The severity of the New England weather was one factor, food shortages another. Alcott removed to the home of a neighbor, he was later to have a home purchased for him by Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord. Alcott’s daughter, Louisa May Alcott, had lived with her family at Fruitlands and later gave the world the novel Little Women, which was set in the house in Concord. Her short story Transcendental Wild Oats describes her stay in the utopian community at Fruitlands.