A digital collection and research portal highlighting the significance of the back-to-the-land movement in St. Lawrence County.
On a gorgeous day, five people weed and thin a bed of spinach in the field called Violet at Birdsfoot Farm.
Collection Overview
Beginning in the 1960s, St. Lawrence County, New York, was one of dozens of rural destinations in the United States to attract the attention of back-to-the-landers, a broad movement of mostly young people seeking anti-materialistic lifestyles in rural settings.
Those first back-to-the-landers have served as examples and inspiration to subsequent generations of aspirants to alternative lifestyles in the country. In St. Lawrence County, back-to-the-landers established communes and individual homesteads experimented with alternatives to the cash economy and tried to sustain themselves through farming and other land-based ventures.
Over the years, they also became engaged citizens of the county, greatly influencing the public life of the region.
Despite the great significance of back-to-the-landers to the history and culture of St. Lawrence County, no systematic effort has ever been made to assemble a research collection on the subject.
The partners in this project aim to amass as complete a record of this population as possible. Three key components of the project will be to search the published record for citations, conduct fieldwork in St. Lawrence County, and invite those associated with the back-to-the-land community to submit copies of their own photographs, journals, and newsletters for inclusion in the collection.