Brook Farm Archaeological Site

Brook Farm has one of the most complex histories in Boston.

The Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag are the holders of the land that includes Boston and Brook Farm. Archaeological evidence shows that Massachusett have lived on the now Brook Farm land for at least 5,000 years.

From the 1600s through 1900s the land that would become Brook Farm was a 170-acre farm with a farmhouse near Baker Street. It was owned by the Ward and later Richards families.

Maria Mayo and Charles Ellis purchased the property in 1784 and used it as a dairy farm until 1840. In the 1830s, George and Sophia Ripley briefly boarded at the Ellis farm. George was a Unitarian minister who grew frustrated with the state of society. He and Sophia decided to form a transcendentalist utopian society at the Ellis farm.

They opened it in 1841 and converted the main farmhouse into "the Hive," the center of their utopian community of around 70 people. The Brook Farm Institute for Education and Agriculture utopian society focused on communal living, equity between sexes, flexible work and leisure activities, and shared labor.

In 1844, the society shifted to a new philosophy, Fourierism, a French social experiment requiring 1620 people to live together in a large communal house known as a phalanstery. Brook Farm became the Brook Farm Phalanx. After many financial setbacks and the burning of the newly-constructed Brook Farm phalanstery in 1846, the utopian community broke up in 1847.

The town of Roxbury purchased the vacant buildings and land in 1849 to use as the town's almshouse. Later, after moving many of its residents to a new State Almshouse, the town recognized the costs and challenges of managing the large property. They decided to sell it to James Freeman Clarke in 1855, who used it as a farm once again until 1868.

Above: Large ca. 1845 ceramic basin from the Hive site that was burned at some point. Glued together from fragments recovered by archaeologists in the 1990s.

In total, the archaeological surveys from the 1990s and 2000s recovered 88,282 artifacts. These artifacts shed light on the experiences of multiple groups of people on the Brook Farm site. These include Massachusett Native people, colonial-era farmers, transcendentalist utopian society members, Civil War soldiers, orphans, poor people, and children with behavioral issues. Few places in Boston contain such a diverse set of archaeological materials and research opportunities.

In 2019, the City of Boston Archaeology Program was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) grant to digitize these collections. This includes the creation of a new spreadsheet-based catalog and searchable image database. Because of the sensitive nature of the many intact archaeological sites protected at Brook Farm, we are not able to make the digitized archaeological reports available online.

This grant also included funding for the creation of an online exhibit, linked to below.

If you are interested in researching this collection, please visit the links below or reach out to us at archaeology@boston.gov.