Green Acre and Sarah Farmer's Free Platform

In Issue 5 of Volume 8 of the Star of the West, dated June 1917, the editors announced the season's summer gatherings at Green Acre — the spiritual retreat that Sarah Farmer had founded in 1894 on the banks of the Piscataqua River in Eliot, Maine, and that she had given over, by deed of trust in 1912, to the Bahá'í community.

The announcement carried a particular weight that year. Sarah Farmer had recently passed away. The retreat she had created — which had begun as a meeting place for thinkers, mystics, peace advocates, theosophists, Buddhists, Christian Scientists, Hindus, and the early Bahá'ís — was now to continue under Bahá'í stewardship.

The Star of the West gave its readers, in the same article, a phrase the Master had used to describe Green Acre during His own visit there in August of 1912.

This unique place offers a free and unrestricted platform.

The phrase was the Master's deliberate praise. Green Acre, in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's reading, was a small American foretaste of the kind of public space the new age required. There the Buddhist monk could speak from the same platform as the Christian clergyman; the Hindu teacher from the same platform as the Jewish rabbi; the radical reformer from the same platform as the conservative theologian. No one was being asked, by the form of the gathering, to renounce his own conviction. Each was being asked to come and to speak — and to listen.

Sarah Farmer had built that platform almost single-handedly. She had taken what had been a failing summer hotel in coastal Maine, gathered the early speakers around her, raised the funds when none were available, and held the institution together through the years when its very mission was suspect to the established religious bodies of the region. She had become a Bahá'í in 1900. By the time she gave the property over to the Faith in 1912, Green Acre had already become an indispensable meeting place in the religious life of New England.

The 1917 announcement informed the friends that the summer program would continue. New speakers had been secured. The Master's earlier praise was reproduced as the standard.

The announcement is small. But it carries, in a single phrase — a free and unrestricted platform — one of the central visions of the Bahá'í Faith for the religious life of the new age. The work Sarah Farmer began on a Maine riverbank has continued, generation after generation, in the small Green Acre sessions where speakers from every tradition still come and sit together in the same room. The sentence the Master gave it in 1912, printed in the Star of the West in 1917, has remained its working motto ever since.

Source: Star of the West, Volume 8, Issue 5 (June 1917), announcement of summer gatherings at Green Acre. Public domain text from bahai-library.com.

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