Seven years ago a man named Stephen Gaskin led 63 school buses of San Francisco hippies out of California and landed them on a muddy plot of land in Tennessee. They settled in to live communally turning their Day‐Glo buses into houses, their 60’s‐inspired beliefs into the law of their land. The group, named The Farm, is located two hours southwest of Nashville, in Summertown, Tenn.

And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold there possessions and goods, will parted them to all men, as every man had need—Acts 2:44, 45.

While other communal endeavors of this era have collapsed, but The Farm has endured to become the largest working commune in America.

More than merely surviving the transition from the 60’s, it has flourished to become something on the order of a small independent country. It has a network of 10 satellite communities, from Franklin, N.Y., to San Rafael, Calif., with a total membership of more than 1,400; businesses ranging from book publishing to C.B. repair; an international relief organization recognized by the United Nations, and its own evangelical religion.

Local Tennessee neighbors who once would have called them “drug‐crazed hippies” now refer to them affectionately as the “longhairs.” Far from rebelling against the American way of life, Stephen and his followers have affirmed a tradition as old as the Pilgrims; If you mean well, believe in God and apply your own hard work, the turf can be your own.

It appears that these “hippies” have become more American than Americans. And, paradoxically, they seem to have fulfilled their ideals of the 60’s by turning dramatically away from the very freedoms that gave birth to those ideals. People who once promoted free love now ban adultery and insist upon marriage. Where they once lived off food stamps, they now work night and day. And, perhaps most extraordinary of all, the same people who once stood firmly and loudly against any absolute authority, whether it be their parents or the state, now accept Stephen Gaskin as their unquestioned and unchallenged leader.

Stephen Gaskin, now 43, emerges from The Farm’s publishing house. He pauses at the own door of his station wagon, as the C.B. radio in the car crackles with communications from distant parts of the commune. Stephen is tall, and unnervingly thin in his jeans, denim vest and denim‐ rubber cowboy boots. He wears wire‐rim glasses, a wispy Ho Chi Minh beard, stringy blond hair to his shoulders, and he stands like someone whose body is a bother to him, someone who’d he happier just wandering around in his bare soul.

Now, in the quiet spring afternoon, it’s as if his force is gravitational. People nearby drop Frisbees, leave unfinished conversations, come through half‐opened doors to move reflexively in his direction. He looks up and singles out a blind girl from the crowd, calling her name and reaching out to pull her close. “I’ve been saving a special joint just for you,” he tells her, taking a cigarette case from his vest pocket. “I want you to hang onto it until we can smoke it together.” She cradles her hands to receive it, her eyes unfocused, a beatific smile spreading across her face as Stephen makes an almost imperceptible inventory to gauge the impact of his action on the quiet assemblage.

Some years back I was among many people considering commune life as a way of putting some of my new‐found values into practice. I believed that a life style based on cooperation made more sense than one based on competition, and after much looking I found a place I thought might make sense as a permanent home—a commune of Northeastern intellectuals transplanted to Virginia. I returned home, bought an Army tent, packed up and piled into my car. But when I drove out of my driveway, I pulled to the curb and parked. Whether it was fear of rural isolation, fear of the loss of individual freedom, or the growing attraction of professional life—I didn’t want to go. My intellect said go, my instincts said no. Or perhaps it was the reverse. Whatever it was, the Army tent got stored in the cellar where it’s been gathering mold ever since. That is why, when I recently visited The Farm, I approached it with a mixture of nostalgia and skepticism.

The land of The Farm stretches out over 1,750 acres of fields and meadows, with blackjack oak crawling along finger ridges and down the banks of back‐hollow creeks. Since its population has grown to 700 adults and 300 children. The Farm has the feel and dimensions of a small town, with its own school, its own free laundromat, its own telephone system (“Beatnik Bell” has extensions in every house). The Farm’s way of life is religious communism in which work and raising children are considered spiritual disciplines, and all agree to put the good of the whole above individual desires. Ego, personality, personal ambitions, all fall under the rubric of selfish “trips,” and are considered destructive vestiges of an old society.

The Farm’s conservative rules are not strictly codified, but they are accepted conditions of life. They exist as beliefs, not laws, and are…