The New Pioneers
(Page 2 of 8)
September/October 1971
By David Gumpert
Some modern-day homesteaders have political motivations. "I don't want to earn a lot of money because I don't want to pay taxes to a government that's been lying about Vietnam and its intentions of solving social problems," asserts David Wilson, 27, an architect who is homesteading with his wife and two children in Maine. His wife Debbie, 28, agrees. "We're just totally exasperated politically," she says.
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Others homestead because of interest in ecology and organic farming. "They're interested in life styles that will let them live well while doing good things for the earth," says John Shuttleworth, editor of Mother Earth News. The magazine, a year and a half old, has already built a circulation of 60,000 with advice on buying land, building pioneer-type homes and organic farming.
A chance to be alone with one's family also attracts some. "We've been invited into communes, but we aren't interested at all," says Mr. Wilson. "We have a tremendous need for solitude and privacy."
Communes are shunned by many homesteaders, in fact, on the ground that they tend to attract hangers-on, drug users and other undesirables who aren't really prepared to cope with the rigors of homesteading.
For Sue and Eliot Coleman, a desire to escape the consumer economy, a chance for real independence and a deep interest in organic farming all played roles in the decision to homestead. But their backgrounds would hardly indicate that they would someday try to live like pioneers.
Eliot, a short, solidly built man with blue eyes and a full head of unkempt, prematurely graying hair, is the son of a Manhattan stockbroker. He graduated from Williams College and worked on Wall Street as a broker trainee himself for a short stint. He soon gave this up to go to Middlebury College in Vermont, where he won a Master's Degree, then wound up teaching Spanish at Ranconia College in New Hampshire. There he met Sue, who was a student. A pretty young woman with soft features and shoulder-length brown hair. Sue is the daughter of a vice president of a suburban Boston bank.
After marrying, the two came to their decision to homestead largely because of the inspiration of the Nearings' book, Living the Good Life.
"We stumbled across the book while looking for yogurt in an old general store in New Hampshire," Eliot says.
Sue and Eliot became vegetarians, as the book advocated, and spent $2,000 of their $5,000 in savings to buy their land in Maine. During their first two months in Maine in the fall of 1968, the couple virtually lived outdoors, their only shelter being a cramped three-foot-high and four-foot-wide homemade camper body in which they slept. By day Eliot chopped down trees and removed the stumps until he had a clearing large enough to build a house on.
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