The Hippies Come Clean
Early Farm resident describes initial attempts at water system

In 1970 a group of 300 young people left San Francisco in a caravan of school buses and traveled across the country looking for a place to call home. After a journey across America, member of the "hippie caravan" settled in Lewis County, Tennessee, and started their community, which they referred to as "The Farm." In this excerpt from the book Voices from The Farm, Philip Schweitzer remembers its early effort to create a plumbing system.
"Arriving in Tennessee after what for many of us had been more than a year of living on the road, we found ourselves finally able to focus on something other than locating rest stops and dump stations and generally keeping our buses in good working order. We could spread out into the woods around us and explore the possibilities of living in a nonmobile environment. We had only the faintest hint of what was in store for us, but we had been living on the edge for quite awhile by then so there was little apprehension about our most uncertain future. Somehow the fact that we had successfully circled the country as a kind of gypsy community made us confident that together we could solve those unknown challenges now that we had landed.
The "Hippie Caravan" makes its way across California.
PHOTO: The Farm
"First on my list of priorities was to take a shower. Sponge baths just weren't going to cut it anymore, and if there was one unpleasant fact of bus life, it was the difficulty in finding a good shower along the highway. Of course, there was the small detail of finding a spigot somewhere in those Tennessee woods. Not that there wasn't plenty of water; in fact that was one of the critical factors in our deciding to locate ourselves in Tennessee. Turned out there was about as much rain there as out in the Pacific Northwest, and springs were plentiful. Unfortunately, most of us liberal arts majors had neglected to take Plumbing 101 at any point along the way. We did have some basic 'how to' skills, I guess, at least enough to know what questions to ask. And we found no shortage of friendly locals ready to tell us how to do things.
"We located one of the many springs at the bottom of a ravine, bought ourselves a submersible pump which we ran on a VW engine (suddenly our vast supply of bus and van parts became a most valuable resource) and we were on our way to running water. We ran a length of plastic pipe up the hill and built ourselves and outdoor shower building, complete with hand-dug drain field that we learned how to make with a government manual and a few hints from the neighbors. I was sure they had at least some vested interest in keeping the hippies clean.

"It was summer by then, and the creek served the purpose while we built our shower house, but the water didn't exactly come preheated. For the new shower we went out and bought the biggest propane hot water heater we could find, right from a factory outside of Nashville. Of course, the biggest hot water heater around isn't going to keep the water hot for two hundred people, cycling through the system at least every couple of days. We ended up only using half the shower heads we had installed, since that was all the little pump and the water heater could support. It became a real challenge to pick the right time to come for a shower, since the line could be an hour or more long.
"But that was only the first lesson we learned. The second one was when the first real freeze came along in the fall of that year, and the entire system of plastic pipe burst into splinters. I remember being amazed at the destructive power of ice and wondered out loud why we hadn't taken some precautions (like turn off the water?). By then we had moved onto our new property next door and were working on a "state of the art" building, fully enclosed and insulated. We had, however, planned to use the parts from the outdoor system for our new shower house, but now there was little left that could even be recognized as once-functional plumbing fixtures. We would have to start from scratch."

Click here to buy a copy of Voices from The Farm and here to be taken on a virtual tour of The Farm.