Far Out Company

Far Out Company Countercultural rarity visual overload Keeping it cosmic.

05/30/2026

1973 footage from the Mt. Philo Commune in Charlotte, Vermont, about 20 minutes south of Burlington. Shot by Robert Machover and Michael Singer.

Mt. Philo might have been the most influential Vermont commune and had a lasting impact on the state. Members created Burlington food co-ops that became today’s popular City Market / Onion River Co-ops (best grocery store), as well as the People’s Free Clinic which became today’s Community Health Centers, and The Schoolhouse Learning Center which is still a thriving independent school. Former member Bridget Downey-Meyer has talked about how easy it was do these things then because of the lack of regulations relative to today. And in 1974 the legendary Living Theatre performance group lived at Mt. Philo and developed their production ‘The Money Tower.’

After existing as a historic inn off and on for many years, the location is now condos 🫠 but there is still one suite available for short-term rentals. It has as an epic view of Lake Champlain out to the Adirondacks.

Shots from Harbinger Commune at Harbin Hot Springs in Middletown, CA, by Bob Fitch and Thomas Weir + some Harbinger publ...
05/29/2026

Shots from Harbinger Commune at Harbin Hot Springs in Middletown, CA, by Bob Fitch and Thomas Weir + some Harbinger publications ♨️

Before Harbin Hot Springs became a clothing-optional New Age spa operated by Heart Consciousness Church, it was the home of a commune called Harbinger starting in 1968. Don Hamrick was its unlikely charismatic leader. He was an architect, physicist and futurist interested in human potential, metaphysics and psychic phenomena, and he had a near-death experience in 1966 which changed him.

He was also friends with the Grateful Dead and Bill Graham, who organized concerts to benefit the commune like the Celestial Synapse event at Fillmore West in 1969, which deadheads still talk about. Under Hamrick, Harbinger published some beautiful far-out publications around 1969, like The Changes, which featured work from Victor Moscoso, R. Crumb, Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse and Lee Conklin.

Harbinger had about 120 members, with 27 shared vehicles that they maintained. Hamrick was also an avid pilot and flew his Cessna Twin airplane around almost daily to and from lecture halls, and there’s some rumors online that he was a CIA operative.

The commune only lasted a short time. Government code-enforcement and drug raids led to its shutdown and a new buyer bought the property in 1972. Hamrick then tried to start Harbinger East in Nova Scotia, after he met a woman there with a 29-room property and a sizable collection of unpublished Wilhelm Reich manuscripts, but it reportedly collapsed before it got going.

05/23/2026

1971 footage from the Maplewood Mudflats in North Vancouver, from ‘Mudflats Living’ by Robert Fresco and Kris Paterson.

The Mudflats was an off-grid community of artists, hippies and squatters who built ramshackle cabins on stilts using driftwood and salvaged materials. In December 1971, the District of North Vancouver evicted them and burned their homes in order to clear the land for the development of a $100M shopping center and apartment complex.

The following year, former Mudflat residents put on the two-week-long Dollarton Pleasure Faire on the site, which was timed to clash with the PNE (Pacific National Exhibition) that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors. Eventually public outrage trumped development and today the Maplewood Mudflats is a wildlife refuge.

Vermont commune vibes from photographer Peter Simon. Simon (brother of Carly and son of the founder of Simon & Schuster)...
05/22/2026

Vermont commune vibes from photographer Peter Simon. Simon (brother of Carly and son of the founder of Simon & Schuster) started Tree Frog Commune in 1970 with Harry Saxman, after they bought an 80-acre farm down the road from Total Loss Farm for $62,500. It was located in Guilford, VT, just over the Massachusetts line, and had a looser “gentleman farmer” vibe than the more hard-core communes further north.

Tree Frog Commune only lasted a few years. After he sold the farm, Simon bought a shack in Gay Head (now Aquinnah) on Martha’s Vineyard, and was married to his wife Ronni on the Gay Head cliffs in a ceremony officiated by Ram Dass.

Hard to get an exact count but Vermont had probably around 200 communes at one point, making it one of the highest per-capita concentrations of communes in the country, with names like New Morning, Wooden Shoe, Toad Hall, Mullein Hill and Pie in the Sky.

[Soundtrack by Vermont’s Jungle 🎶]

Early ‘70s shots from Wheeler’s Ranch in Sonoma County by Bob Fitch and Robert Altman. It was a 320-acre commune on Cole...
05/15/2026

Early ‘70s shots from Wheeler’s Ranch in Sonoma County by Bob Fitch and Robert Altman. It was a 320-acre commune on Coleman Valley Road in Occidental, north of Bodega Bay, on land owned by Bill Wheeler, a painter from Connecticut who inherited a fortune from his family’s early sewing machine business.

When the nearby Morningstar Ranch commune was shut down by authorities, Wheeler welcomed people there to live on his land. Before long there were 300 hippies inhabiting self-erected cabins and makeshift structures on his remote property.

One day in May of 1973, while Wheeler was out of town, bulldozers sent by county officials rumbled onto the land and smashed his house and studio. When he returned a few days later, he and the residents set fire to the remaining structures before the bulldozers were set to come back.

Wheeler then moved to Bolinas, and came back a few years later after a friend had bought out the neighbor who had started the county crackdown. He took up art again there and enjoyed success as a landscape painter.

05/03/2026

1970 video (directed by Francis Ford Coppola) from a record I picked up yesterday at in Boston: the classic “Mill Valley” by Miss Rita Abrams and the Strawberry Point 4th Grade Class.

Abrams moved from Boston to California in 1968 and secured a teaching post at Strawberry Point Elementary School in Mill Valley, CA. Enthralled by the beauty of the town, she wrote this song with a chorus for her students to sing and managed to get it heard by record producer Erik Jacobsen, who produced the number-one hit of 1970 (“Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum). Warner Bros ran with it and it blew up on the Adult Contemporary chart.

It captures the vibe of Mill Valley at a special (and more affordable) time, and some of the kids lucky enough to grow up there then. Later Rita wrote the music for the ‘I Want It All Now’ documentary about life in Marin County.

05/02/2026

Cult Time: Sandra Good (aka Blue) of the Manson Family was interviewed on KPIX-TV in 1975. The following year she was found guilty of sending death threats to corporate executives and was imprisoned until 1985.

When she got out on parole she moved to Vermont, and lived quietly under a pseudonym until she made the news again for leading a campaign against International Paper Company’s pollution of Lake Champlain, and her identity was made public. She then moved back to California to be closer to Manson and ran a website to support Manson’s environmental movement, ATWA (Air Trees Water Animals, or All The Way Alive).

‘70s shots from the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune / Renaissance Community in Western Massachusetts. The self-describ...
05/01/2026

‘70s shots from the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune / Renaissance Community in Western Massachusetts. The self-described “most successful commune in the United States” had hundreds of members, at least a dozen businesses, four homesteads, a preschool, a nursery, a food co-op, a recording studio and a rock band. Michael Metelica was its leader and figurehead for 20 years until he was paid to leave and never return in 1988, when it ended. Turners Falls, MA, has never been the same.

Alaina Snipper is the sign painter, who did some amazing work.

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03864

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