In 1971, 300 hippies led by a charismatic English professor named Stephen Gaskin, hopped onto 50 busses and left San Francisco to find land where they could establish their vision of Utopia. They settled in Summertown, Tennessee, and over the past 40 years, The Farm has morphed from a hippie commune to a cooperative community with a book publishing company, an environmental training center, a world-renown midwifery/natural childbirth clinic, and a global relief program. Gaskin died in July, but many of the original ‘caravaners’ are still there, although the population has waned to a few hundred from its peak of 1500 back in the 1980s.
40 Years on the Farm, airing tonight, Thursday, August 28 at 8 p.m., tells the extraordinary story of the community.
