The New Pioneers

Enlarge Image Image Gallery

Eliot and Sue Coleman Find
'Homesteading' Is Satisfying Way of Life

Reprinted with permission of The Wall Street Journal/30 Broad Street/New York, N. Y. 10004

BUCKSPORT, Maine—When Sue and Eliot Coleman sit down to eat in their tiny one-room house, they use tree stumps instead of chairs. When they need drinking water, Sue walks a quarter of a mile through the woods to a freshwater brook and hauls back two big containers hanging from a yoke over her shoulders. And when the Colemans want to read at night, they light kerosene lanterns.

The young couple—Sue is 26, Eliot 31—aren't the forgotten victims of rural poverty or some natural disaster. They live as they do out of choice. They have deliberately given up such luxuries as indoor plumbing, store-bought furniture and everything that electricity makes possible. They have no telephone, no automatic mixer, no TV set.

With their two-year-old daughter, Melissa, Sue and Eliot are trying to escape America's consumer economy and live in the wilderness much as the country's pioneers did. They grow about 80% of their own food and spend only about $2,000 a year on things they can't make themselves.

The Colemans have been living this way two and a half years and they're proud of their accomplishment. "If you listen to Madison Avenue, we don't exist," says Eliot. "They say it's impossible to live on $2,000.

The Colemans are among a tiny but apparently growing number of young couples, often from middle-class families, who are taking up the pioneering life, or "homesteading" as it's often called—though today's pioneers usually can't get free land from the government as early homesteaders did. Favorite homesteading areas are New England, the Pacific Northwest, the Ozarks and Canada. Sue and Eliot have 40 acres of thick forest 30 miles south of this small town near the central Maine coast.

No one knows just how many people are taking up homesteading. The Colemans say they personally know about a dozen couples. A neighbor of the Colemans, Helen Nearing, 67, who with her husband, Scott, now 87, retreated to a homestead in Vermont in the early 1930s and later moved to Maine, says "a lot of people, more than 100, are getting land and living off of it."

There's no doubt that interest is growing. In 1954 the Nearings wrote a book on the subject called Living the Good Life. Only 10,000 copies were sold in the 16 years up to last September. But nearly 50,000 have been sold since then in a new edition.

People are turning to the pioneer life for a variety of reasons. Many are inspired by the philosophy of the Nearings who lived 20 years in Vermont before they found ski resorts, and other signs of modern civilization crowding in on them. In their book, the Nearings said they originally retreated to the land to find "simplicity, freedom from anxiety or tension, an opportunity to be useful and to live harmoniously." They arranged their lives so that, after working to produce what they needed to live, they had ample time for "avocational p ursuits" like reading, writing, hiking and simply talking.