Fruitlands Museum
Introduction
Text-to-speech Audio
Images
Shaker Museum
The Fruitlands Farmhouse.
The Native American Gallery.
Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, Massachusetts, USA.
Backstory and Context
Text-to-speech Audio
The museum takes its name from an experimental Utopian Community led by Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane which took place on this site in 1843. Fruitlands was inspired by Transcendentalism and Amos Bronson Alcott's ideas of societal reform. It was a spiritual community based on shared moral values. The Fruitlands family practiced an extreme asceticism, eating nothing but fruits, vegetables and grain, and drinking only water. The community ultimately failed because of the difficulty in growing crops, it never exceeded 16 members, including Alcott and his family and Lane and his son, and eight others. Lane and Alcott abandoned Fruitlands in January 1844.