LOUISA, Va. — It was 1967 when residents of conservative, rural Louisa County learned that some young people were starting a commune on a 400-acre farm outside town.
"Most people here didn't even know what a commune was," recalled Hilda Powell, a lifelong resident and editor of the Central Virginian newspaper.
Families living on the area's historic farms were as much astonished as alarmed at the prospect of abutting a radical social experiment.
Most of the thousands of communes that sprang up in the United States during the 1960s and '70s have long since disbanded in the face of economic pressures and changing social trends. But Louisa County's Twin Oaks--one of the oldest communes in the United States--has thrived.
No longer feared as the vanguard of a new society, Twin Oaks today is simply a pocket of about 80 like-minded people living together in the rolling Virginia countryside--evidence of the seemingly boundless ability of American society to absorb diversity.
"They're now well-accepted," said Henry A. Kennon, Louisa's sheriff since 1964. The commune's longhaired men buy supplies in Louisa without raising a local eyebrow. Twin Oakers frequent the town's public library, and many were active in protesting a nearby nuclear power plant a few years back.
Twin Oaks is one of as many as 1,000 communal living groups in the country. While they coexist harmoniously with mainstream society, they offer an alternative to some patterns of work and family life--patterns that still trouble many Americans.
"The communal impulse covers everything from financial convenience to need for membership in a group," said Bennett Berger, a sociologist with UC San Diego who has studied communes in rural California. "People in any age need some sense of the community, which in a post-modern society is not that easy to find."
Based on a vision of a Utopian society described in B.F. Skinner's 1948 novel "Walden Two," Twin Oaks was founded as a noncompetitive, nonsexist, nonviolent environment providing equal opportunities and resources for all.
To a remarkable extent, it has apparently succeeded.
While many rural communes, such as the 1,500-member Farm in Tennessee, have failed for financial reasons, Twin Oaks is anchored by a hammock-making business worth $1 million in gross sales a year.
