The Catholic Worker Farm in Lincoln County, West Virginia, 1970-1990: an Experiment in Sustainable Community

Journal of Moral Theology, Vol. 6, Special Issue 1 (2017): 74-93 The Catholic Worker Farm in Lincoln County, West Virginia, 1970-1990: An Experiment in Sustainable Community William J. Collinge N 1975, DOROTHY DAY WROTE, “It will be Chuck Smith, in West Virginia, who will be writing about agronomic universities or farming communes—that aspect of Peter [Maurin]’s program that we New Yorkers have never been able to get off the I 1 ground.” This paper discusses Chuck Smith, on whom Day pinned her hopes, and the Catholic Worker farm in West Virginia that he co- founded.2 The Catholic Worker movement had just come into being in 1933 through the encounter of Day, a journalist and activist who had be- come Catholic in 1927 and was searching for a way to combine her faith with her social commitments, and Peter Maurin, a French-born wandering self-styled “agitator,” who was steeped in French and Eng- lish Catholic social thought as well as European secular radicalism.3 “Peter Maurin came to me,” Day wrote, “with Kropotkin in one pocket and St. Francis in the other.”4 In Day, he saw someone who could help him put his program to build “a new society within the shell of the old”5 (an anarchist slogan) into practice. He expressed his ideals in little treatises written in sense lines, which he would declaim or dis- tribute; these were later dubbed “Easy Essays.” Maurin’s program had three components: (1) round-table discussions for the clarification of thought; (2) houses of hospitality, to give food and shelter to the poor 1 Dorothy Day, “On Pilgrimage,” The Catholic Worker, January 1975, 8. 2 Much of the research for this paper was done in the Dorothy Day – Catholic Worker Archives, Rayner Memorial Libraries, Marquette University. I wish to thank Phil Runkel, Archivist, for much help over the years. I wish also to thank Xandy Adams for his detailed reply to my inquiries. My attempts to contact Chuck Smith were un- successful. 3 See Jim Forest, All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day (New York: Orbis Books, 2011), 96-110. 4 Day, “On Pilgrimage,” The Catholic Worker, February 1974, 8. 5 Peter Maurin, Radical Christian Thought: Easy Essays, ed. Chuck Smith (West Vir- ginia: Catholic Worker Farm, 1973), 23. The Catholic Worker Farm 75 and unemployed; and (3) farming communes or “agronomic universities.” In Day, he saw the person who could put his ideas into practice. They became the core of the Catholic Worker movement. The idea of round-table discussions gave rise to the Catholic Worker newspaper, first published in New York in May 1933 and con- tinuing to appear every month or two, as well as to discussions and lecture series at the Catholic Worker houses in New York and else- where. Houses of hospitality began later in 1933, when homeless people from the surrounding Lower East Side neighborhood came to Day’s apartment above the Worker office, and continue to this day in Catholic Worker soup kitchens and lodging for the homeless across the country.6 It is relatively easy to found a discussion group and to provide shelter for the homeless, and in 1933 even founding a newspaper was within reach for those determined to do it. But Maurin’s farming communes or “agronomic universities” were an aim of a different order, far more grandiose, a vision meant to replace modern industrial society and solve its problems. Maurin sometimes called his ideal the “Green Revolution,” in contrast to the Red Revolution of Com- munism. His image of farming communes drew on the peasant village where he was born,7 combined with an idealized version of medieval monasticism.8 The communes would be educational centers and wor- ship centers; there people would find meaningful work and there would be no unemployment. One such group would be college graduates who could not find work. According to one of Maurin’s Easy Es- says: On Farming Communes: unemployed college graduates will be taught how to build their house, how to gather their fuel, how to raise their food, how to make their furniture; that is to say, 6 Day, House of Hospitality (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1939). 7 Maurin (1877-1949) was born in the village of Oultet, department of Lozère, then in the region of Languedoc (now Occitanie). The best biography of him is Dorothy Day, with Francis J. Sicius, Peter Maurin: Apostle to the World (New York: Orbis Books, 2004). Sicius edited and supplemented a manuscript by Day. 8 William J. Collinge, “Peter Maurin’s Ideal of Farming Communes,” Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement: Centenary Essays, ed. William Thorn, Phillip Runkel, and Susan Mountin (Wisconsin: Marquette University Press, 2001), 393-95. See also Day and Sicius, Peter Maurin, 123-36. 76 William J. Collinge how to employ themselves. On Farming Communes: unemployed college graduates will learn to use both their hands and their heads.9 Prayer, study, and work—or, as Maurin put it, “cult, culture, and cultivation”—would be joined harmoniously. Maurin had relatively little to say about farming as such, but he favored an organic, labor-intensive approach, much at odds with the mechanized, chemical-intensive approach already taking hold among American farmers.10 The farms should be self-sufficient; “Eat what you raise and raise what you eat,” he said.11 The New York Catholic Worker community tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to create an “agronomic university.” The first serious attempt was a farm at Easton, Pennsylvania, founded in 1936. Beset throughout its existence by a shortage of people able and willing to do the actual work of farming, it collapsed in dissension in 1947.12 A farm at Newburgh, New York, from 1947 to 1955 functioned mainly as a retreat house. In 1964 the Worker bought a large, decrepit estate in Tivoli, New York, capable of housing about seventy people. Some farming was done there, and retreats and conferences held there, but, like Easton, this community soon became a “house of hospitality on the land,” in Day’s words. Moreover, it ran afoul of the social dislo- cations of the 1960s, including drug use and sexual experimentation of various kinds. Discouraged, Day wrote in 1967, “It has been a par- ticularly bad summer, with so many young people using the place as a ‘pad’ who do not even know the CW, but are just referred to us as though we were diggers or hippies.”13 Agronomic universities were coming to seem to her an impossible ideal. 9 Peter Maurin, Radical Christian Thought: Easy Essays, ed. Chuck Smith (West Vir- ginia: Catholic Worker Farm, 1973), 47-48. 10 Collinge, “Peter Maurin’s Ideal,” 395-96. 11 Day, The Long Loneliness (California: HarperSanFrancisco, 1981 [1952]), 176. 12 For a succinct account of the Easton farm, see Forest, All Is Grace, 144-149. 13 Day, letter to Charles Butterworth, August 11, 1967, in Robert Ellsberg, ed., All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day (Wisconsin: Marquette Univer- sity Press, 2010), 337. Other Catholic Worker communities had little to no more suc- cess with farming than had the New York community. The Worker community even- tually sold the Tivoli property in 1978. In 1979, the community purchased a small farm near Marlboro, New York, which they named “Peter Maurin Farm.” It has been maintained by Tom Cornell and his family since 1993. It takes in a few short- and long-term guests and provides vegetables for the New York houses, but it is not the site of any sort of educational program. I am grateful to one of the blind reviewers of this paper for correcting my account of the Marlboro farm. The Catholic Worker Farm 77 CHUCK SMITH Letters from Chuck Smith in West Virginia began to reach Day late in 1969,14 rekindling her hopes that Maurin’s plan might be realized after all. Born in Kansas in 1941, Charles Edward “Chuck” Smith had been a Capuchin lay brother at Cumberland, MD, for five years before coming as a VISTA volunteer15 to Ridgeview, Boone County, West Virginia: “I came to West Virginia in 1967 to work with several other young organizers under the direction of Jim Somerville, a Presbyterian minister, whose prophetic vision of justice for the Appalachian poor reminds one of Jeremiah.”16 Smith came to reject capitalism, “seeing how the coal and chemical interests had made West Virginia a domes- tic colony for exploitation,” and his work for VISTA had soured him on governmental solutions to poverty and hence on socialism.17 He was dissatisfied, he later told William Miller, because community organizers had “purely economic aims.”18 While at Ridgeview, he took out a subscription to the Catholic Worker newspaper and ordered a copy of Peter Maurin’s Easy Essays. As he said to Miller: When I read it Peter synthesized all my ideas for me in that book, and what I really felt made sense was given perspective and so I guess right then I knew that probably the best way to deal with the major social and economic problems of Appalachee [sic] was to try and demonstrate alternatives such as he suggested, especially in his model of cult, culture, and cultivation.19 Smith saw a major problem of Appalachian people as disenfranchise- ment, the sense that they had no say in the conditions within which they lived and worked. And the Catholic Worker ideals of personalism and decentralism responded to that situation: I think the idea of personalism and decentralism, which I think are the key underlying philosophy or theory of Catholic Worker thought, an- swer the most basic problem of human alienation that’s pretty much basic to all times.

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