A Place for the Whole World: Sarah Farmer and Green Acre

A retelling based on the contemporary record preserved in the Star of the West, the early Bahá'í magazine, which documented the founding of Green Acre by Sarah Farmer and its life as a Bahá'í centre of learning. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that record.

Some people build a community by gathering souls one at a time; others build it by making a place — a piece of ground set apart where people who would never otherwise meet can come together, sit down, and listen to one another. Sarah Farmer built such a place. On a green hillside above the Piscataqua River, at Eliot in the state of Maine, she founded a summer gathering called Green Acre, and out of her vision there grew one of the first enduring Bahá'í centres of learning in the Western world. Her life is a parable of a particular kind of service: the service of preparing the ground, so that unity has somewhere to take root.

Sarah Jane Farmer was a New England woman of cultivated mind and large heart, born in 1847 into a family that prized ideas and reform. She came of age in an era when thoughtful people on both sides of the Atlantic were hungry for something the ordinary religious life of the time did not seem to give them — a way past the old walls that divided faith from faith and creed from creed, a meeting of the world's wisdom on common ground. Sarah Farmer felt that hunger keenly, and she conceived an idea remarkable for its day. She would open a place, each summer, where teachers and seekers of every religion and philosophy — Christians and Jews, students of the faiths of the East, scientists and philosophers and reformers — could gather in peace, present what they believed, and seek the truth together without rancour.

In 1894 she dedicated Green Acre to that vision. The setting itself seemed to preach her message: open fields, great trees, the wide quiet of the river, a landscape that calmed the spirit and made room for thought. People came — and kept coming, summer after summer. From a great pine grove and a simple inn, Green Acre grew into a gathering known across the country, a place where the platforms of the day's most interesting minds stood open and where the air itself seemed charged with the search for a higher unity. Sarah Farmer poured herself, and her means, into it. She was its founder, its hostess, its guiding spirit, and the whole enterprise rested on the strength of her conviction that humanity was meant to come together and that someone had to build the room in which it could.

But Sarah Farmer was not content merely to host a conversation about unity. She was herself a genuine seeker, and her own search did not stop at the founding of Green Acre. She had heard, as had a growing number of Americans at the turn of the century, of the Bahá'í teachings, and of the Prisoner of 'Akká whose message proclaimed the oneness of God, the oneness of religion, and the oneness of mankind. Here, it seemed, was the very thing she had been reaching toward — not as one philosophy among the many displayed on her own platforms, but as a fountainhead, a revelation that placed the unity of humankind at the centre of the purpose of God for the age. She determined to go and see for herself. She made the long pilgrimage to the Holy Land and attained the presence of 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

What she found there confirmed and crowned everything she had been working for. In the Master she met the living embodiment of the unity she had spent her life trying to make a space for; in His teachings she recognised the source of it. She came home a Bahá'í — and now her great founding took on a new meaning in her own eyes. The place she had built for the meeting of all the world's truths could become a place dedicated to the Cause that proclaimed all those truths to be streams of one ocean. And so Sarah Farmer did the generous and self-effacing thing that her whole character had been preparing her for. She gave Green Acre into the keeping of the Faith she had embraced. The work of her hands, the beloved enterprise that bore the stamp of her vision, she entrusted to a cause larger than herself, so that it might endure and grow beyond anything she could have given it alone.

The gift was not without its difficulties; the passing of so cherished an institution from one founder's hand into the keeping of a community is never simple, and the later years of Sarah Farmer's life held trials and frailty. But the essential thing held. Green Acre became, and has remained, a Bahá'í centre of learning — a place where, summer after summer, believers and seekers gather on that same green hillside to study the Writings, to deepen their understanding, and to practise the very fellowship across every line of difference that Sarah Farmer had dreamed of when she first dedicated the ground. 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself, when He travelled across America in 1912, went to Green Acre and spoke there, blessing the place and the purpose for which it had been raised, and binding it forever to the work of unity.

What makes Sarah Farmer's life a story for a Feast of Mulk, of Dominion, is the particular shape of her service. She did not preach to crowds or carry the message across continents. She did something quieter and, in its way, just as essential to the building of a community: she made a place. She understood that unity does not happen in the abstract; it happens when real people come to a real ground, set aside their guardedness, and learn to listen. She built that ground, sustained it by her own conviction and substance, and then — when she found the Cause that gave her whole vision its source and its name — she had the greatness of soul to give her creation away, so that it might serve that Cause forever.

The dominion of God is built, in part, by people like this: founders of the gathering-places, makers of the rooms in which strangers become friends and many truths are seen at last to be one. Sarah Farmer prepared such a place on a Maine hillside, and then gave it to the world. Green Acre still stands, and still does the work she began.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see the contemporary reports on Green Acre and Sarah Farmer preserved in the Star of the West.

Editors, S. O. T. W.. (1917). *Star of the West*. Bahai News Service. https://bahai-library.com/star_of_the_west_volume_1