By Gregory Crofton
The documentary “40 Years on the Farm” is about something rare — a successful commune. This one was located in Tennessee and features an interview with Stephen Gaskin, its founder, who died in 2014 at the age of 79.
Gaskin organized a Monday night philosophy club while working as an English teacher at San Francisco State University in the late 1960s. During the meetings, they discussed the Hippie Movement and things like how psychedelic experiences related to religion.
Membership to the night class grew. Eventually the group hit the road in a caravan of livable school buses. Gaskin led conversations around the country focusing them around messages of peace and prosperity. The caravan found land to call home in Summertown, Tennessee, about an hour Southeast of Nashville when 300 or so of them arrived there in 1971.
They purchased 1,000 acres at $70 each from a moonshiner, according to an article in The Tennessean. By the early 1980s, the population of The Farm had swelled to more than 1,200, but crushing medical bills led to a breakdown of their true communal lifestyle and their self-governed community went from being communistic to a cooperative one.
Since then The Farm has operated as a mix of a collective and private economy and has developed a number of nonprofit businesses including a midwifery center, a book publishing house, the invention of a radiation detector, and the creation of the hunger relief organization Plenty International.
Randy Rudder, a producer of the “40 Years on The Farm” and an adjunct English teacher at Aquinas College and segment producer for the Christian Broadcasting Network, first heard about The Farm at a birthing class with his wife.
He wrote a nonfiction essay about the community for a writing class and then decided to expand it into a documentary.
“What I’m most proud of I guess … I think we were maybe some of the last people to do some fairly extensive interviews with Stephen Gaskin before he passed,” Rudder said. “It’s also my biggest regret … I wanted to get it out before he died. And we waited a little bit too long.”
“Forty Years on The Farm” made its debut at the Nashville Film Festival in 2012. The documentary is Rudder’s first full-length film, and he said he’d like to make more.
Some of the subjects he wants to pursue related to Nashville include: Jimi Hendrix and Paul McCartney’s days working in the city, the literary history the historic black college Fisk University, the life of author and Vanderbilt professor Robert Penn Warren.
There is another documentary about The Farm called “American Commune.” It was produced by two sisters who grew up as part of the community but left in 1985. You can watch “American Commune” here.