The small farm in Brooksville where back-to-the-land icons Helen and Scott Nearing cemented their cultural legacy among the country’s small farmers and homesteaders has been added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Forest Farm, now known as the nonprofit Good Life Center, was the couple’s third and final homestead. It drew thousands of visitors each year after a popular 1970 reissue of their book “Living the Good Life,” which is widely credited with helping spur the “back to the land” movement among urban and suburban people seeking a different way of life.
That movement took place across the country in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, and in Maine, it brought an influx of young new residents that helped shape the state in the decades to follow.
The new national registry listing reflects the importance of the Nearings’ influence here and far beyond, according to Warren Berkowitz, a Good Life Center board member who was himself drawn to Maine by the Nearings. It also comes as the nonprofit that runs the center aims to become more publicly active, and will help to protect the homestead as a historic site.
“I think it’s important in terms of our future, and I think the legacy [of the Nearings] and the message behind the legacy is really more important than ever,” Berkowitz said. “I think the designation kind of reflected that.”
The Nearings first published “Living the Good Life” in 1952, the year they moved from a homestead in Vermont to the Brooksville village of Harborside. Along with promoting self-reliance and community in homesteading, they were pacifist, vegetarian anti-capitalists who wrote numerous books.
Thousands of people from across the country were drawn by “Living the Good Life” to Forest Farm each year to meet the couple and often worked with them, helping to build the stone structures on the property throughout the 1970s.
The homestead listed on the register includes a house, garage, outhouse, greenhouse and garden walls that the Nearings designed and built by hand with local stones when Helen was in her 70s and Scott in his 90s. Three yurts onsite were designed and built by William Coperthwaite, a Down East author and yurt-building pioneer who helped popularize the structures.
After Helen Nearing’s death in 1995, the center became a nonprofit that hires seasonal stewards and opens to visitors from Juneteenth to Indigenous People’s Day. It hosts workshops and classes related to organic gardening, social and economic justice, sustainable living skills, vegetarianism and environmental causes.
The new designation could also open new grant opportunities at the center for projects such as adding handicap accessibility and preserving the couple’s expansive library, which spans topics from socialism to physics to gardening to unidentified flying objects. The board aims to create more opportunities for scholars and academics to access the titles, Berkowitz said, and hopes to add writing retreats and workshops on themes related to the Nearings’ work.
“Members of board at the time felt strongly that the legacy of the Nearings, and the continued interest in the Nearings, really fostered a situation where we felt that it was really a historic site because of the influence it had on Maine history and international history,” he said.
Two of the couple’s past homes, one nearby in Harborside and the other in Vermont, may also be eligible for the national register, according to the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, which presents properties for national review.
“Their influence at the national level up to Helen’s death in 1995 is exceptional and is reflected in the continued involvement in the homesteading movement through publishing, teaching, and mentoring,” the commission said.
