Brook Farm

Brook Farm, also known as the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education or the Brook Farm Association for Industry and Education, was a utopian community for communal living founded in 1841 at the Ellis Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. It was established by former Unitarian minister George Ripley and his wife Sophia Ripley, drawing on the transcendentalist philosophy current in New England at the time. Organized as a joint stock company, it promised participants a share of the farm's profits in exchange for an equal share of its work, on the belief that shared labor would leave ample time for leisure and intellectual life.