Ny Times Article On Failed Commune In Pennsylvania

They Built it, But No One Came

PITMAN, Pa. — They slept in the barn their first winter, on a straw mattress with antique linen sheets and a feather tick. There was no electricity, heat or plumbing, so they made their own candles, used a chamber pot and drew water from a spring.
They were born Michael Colby and Donald Graves, but once there, on 63 acres in the Mahantongo Valley, a bowl of land in central Pennsylvania, they changed their names to Christian and Johannes Zinzendorf and called themselves the Harmonists, inspired by a splinter group of 18th-century Moravian brothers who believed in the spiritual values of an agrarian life.
Their ideals were lofty but simple: They would live off the land, farming with Colonial-era tools, along with a band of like-minded men dressed in homespun robes wielding scythes and pickaxes. They would sleep in atmospheric log cabins and other 18th-century structures that they had rescued from the area and that they began to reconstruct, painstakingly, brick by crumbling brick and log by log.

But what if you built a commune, and no one came?

 

Sad story but glad they finally found peace and acceptance in their old age. The bit about charisma... I relate to that. That's probably how things would go if I tried starting anything up.

I wonder what happened to the loin cloth dude? I wonder if he did himself in, was taken away or just wandered off? They said he was the last to leave, but they didn't mention the circumstances...