Page 3 - C.A.L.L. #38 - Summer 2014

To coincide with the release of a documentary film “American Commune”, a project by
filmmaker-sisters Nadine and Rena Mundo who were born on The Farm in the 1970s,

many column inches have been written in the press about the Tennessee community.
Here we publish an interview with two long-standing community members

By Andres Diaz
www.hlntv.com

Phil and Mary Schweitzer met and fell in love on The Farm, a former hippy commune
in Tennessee. Phil is a founding member of the community. Mary has lived there for
about 35 years. Today they live in a beautiful home they built, which they run as
a bed and breakfast. But life wasn't always so easy…

It must have been tough. It must have
been really difficult.

Mary: I can describe it really easily. It was

like camping out for 10 years. That's my
standard line. It was hard. You know, only
cold running water and then sometimes not
even that. In the winter the pipes would
freeze.... We were very committed to being
together and doing this thing and raising our kids.

Phil: We were cold in the winter. We were hungry. There were times when it was hard
to get shoes on your feet. There were real financial challenges for many years. And

one of the things that sustained us was that we didn't just live here but we also went
to do relief and development work around the world. And seeing the way people lived
in the third world made us feel wealthy.

Someone described The Farm as being an intentional community. What do you
think is the intent behind the Farm?

Mary: Well, we really have a nice group of friends here. We try to live in peace and
harmony and not harm the earth.

Phil: We came here as a group because we wanted to have a collective voice that
would be loud enough that people could hear. We weren't hiding. We weren't running
away. We were saying, 'We have things we'd like to communicate.' But people aren't

listening to one or two of us. But if we've got 200 of us, or 1,000 of us, then we're
going to have a voice. And people will notice.

As many of the original members begin to reach their golden years, there's a
new debate about what will happen in the future. There's concern among many

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