Communing With Nature
After stints in Haight-Ashbury, as many as one million hippies headed for the hills. Some of their communes have persisted into the present.
Hog Farm
Location: Laytonville, California
Founded: 1965
Description: Hog Farm, the longest-running hippie commune in the United States, was founded by peace activist Hugh “Wavy Gravy” Romney in North Hollywood and moved to its eponymous hog farm in Sunland-Tujunga in the late 1960s. The group is best known for helping put on the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969 and continues to host music festivals as well as a performing arts camp at its ranch in Laytonville, California.
Twin Oaks Community
Location: Louisa County, Virginia
Founded: 1967
Description: Initially founded as an experimental behaviorist commune — based on the principles outlined in psychologist B. F. Skinner’s 1948 novel Walden Two — but later joined by a steady stream of freewheeling hippies, Twin Oaks endures to this day as the only fully income-sharing intentional community in the United States. The current community of about 100 members survives off agriculture and the sale of tofu and hammocks, which all members contribute to on rotation during 42-hour workweeks.
Black Bear Ranch
Location: Siskiyou County, California
Founded: 1968
Description: Founded in an abandoned gold mining town in Northern California and funded in part by “the proceeds from a major LSD deal,” Black Bear Ranch remains one of the more radical communes in the United States, due to its distinctly anarchist organization. Many of the original residents were affiliated with the Diggers, a San Francisco–based community action and guerrilla theater group; today about 40 people remain on the commune, which has shifted its focus toward land stewardship in tandem with the local Karuk Tribe.
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