Page 15 - C.A.L.L. #40 - Winter 2015

They Built a Commune but No One Came

By PENELOPE GREEN
May 16, 2015
Nytimes.com

They slept in the barn their first 18th-century structures that they
winter, on a straw mattress with had rescued from the area and that

antique linen sheets and a feather they began to reconstruct,
tick. There was
no electricity,
heat or plumbing,
so they made
their own
candles, used a
chamber pot and
drew water from
a spring.

They were born
Michael Colby
and Donald
Graves, but once
there, on 63

acres in the Mahantongo Valley, a painstakingly, brick by crumbling
bowl of land in central Pennsylvania, brick and log by log.
they changed their names to
Christian and Johannes Zinzendorf But what if you built a commune, and
and called themselves the no one came?
Harmonists, inspired by a splinter
group of 18th-century Moravian It turns out it’s not so easy to cook
brothers who believed in the up a utopia from scratch. There are
spiritual values of an agrarian life. 1,775 so-called intentional
communities listed in the Fellowship
Their ideals were lofty but simple: for Intentional Community’s United
They would live off the land, farming States directory: eco-villages, pagan
with Colonial-era tools, along with a co-ops, faith-based retreats and
band of like-minded men dressed in everything in between. But how do

homespun robes wielding scythes and you advertise, organize and thrive?
pickaxes. They would sleep in “Don’t ask us,” Johannes said. “We
atmospheric log cabins and other failed that class.”

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