Fruitlands (transcendental center)
Fruitlands was a utopian agrarian commune established in Harvard, Massachusetts, by Amos Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane in the 1840s, based on transcendentalist principles. An account of its less-than-successful activities can be found in Transcendental Wild Oats by Alcott's daughter Louisa May Alcott.
Farmhouse at Fruitlands (photographed in 2015)
Fruitlands photographed in 1915
Fruitlands co-founder Amos Bronson Alcott
Greaves' Table of the Circumstantial Law, as revised by Fruitlands co-founder Charles Lane
Harvard is a town in Worcester County, Massachusetts, United States. The town is located 25 miles west-northwest of Boston, in eastern Massachusetts. It is mostly bounded by I-495 to the east and Route 2 to the north. A farming community settled in 1658 and incorporated in 1732, it has been home to several non-traditional communities, such as Harvard Shaker Village and the utopian transcendentalist center Fruitlands. It is also home to St. Benedict Abbey, a traditional Catholic monastery, and for over seventy years was home to Harvard University's Oak Ridge Observatory, at one time the most extensively equipped observatory in the Eastern United States. It is now a rural and residential town noted for its public schools. The population was 6,851 at the 2020 census.
The renovated library, established in 1856
Harvard Shaker Village c. 1905
Old Stone Barn (c. 1915), in Harvard Shaker Village
Fruitlands Museum, 2008