George Ripley
By Spencer Scamehorn
Facts about George
October 2, 1802, died July 4, 1880 when he pushed to attended Harvard College, Cambridge Massachusetts in 1823, he also worked at a church called Purchase Street Church in Boston, Massachusets.
What he Did
He started questioning the beleifs at the Purchase Street Church in Boston, Massachusets, so he decided to make a utopian society called Brook Farm. What it was, is a community that was a utopian experiment. It was a in West Roxbury, Massachusets. Another reason he made Brook Farm was because he thought there where to many rules that made you someone else and not yourself.
Brook Farm
Life on Brook Farm was based on balanced labor and leisure while working together to build a better community. Each member could choose what job they would and which would suit them best, and the pay was equal through out the whole farm, including women. Revenue for the farm came from farming and from selling home made products such as clothing as well as through fees paid by the many visitors to Brook Farm. The Brook Farm ended when George Ripley could no onger pay for the place when a man named Orestes Brownson said that Brook Farm's 'atomosphere was horrible'. to save money they started making sacrifices, were called for, particlary at the dinner table. Meat, tea, coffee, and a donated turkey was al they had to eat at a time. Later smallpox broke out in the area, though no one died 26 Brook Farmers were infected. But the true mark as the end of Brook Farm was when a Phalanstery had caught fire, and the building was uninsured, and to rebuild wuold cost $7,000 dollars which the Brook Farm did not have. By the official end it owed a total debt of $17,445.
After Brook Farm
After the Phalanstery burned down, Ripley made an unoffical leave from Brook Farm, and shortly after other members started leaving. When he left he began to be a freelancing journalist. In 1849 he was employed by Horace Greeley at the New York Tribune, taking the role vacant by Margaret Fuller. In his later years he started suffering frequent illnessess, including about with influenza in 1875, which prevented him from traveling. Ripley was fpund dead at is desk slumped over his work on July 4 1880. At the time of his death he was financially succsessful; The New American Cyclopedia had earned him royalties of nearly $1.5 million.