Green Acre's Summer School Comes of Age

In its issue dated the seventeenth of August 1915 the *Star of the West* gave a long descriptive notice of the summer program then in progress at Green Acre, the Bahá'í retreat property at Eliot, Maine, on the Piscataqua River near the New Hampshire border. The property had been the inheritance of Sarah Farmer, the daughter of the inventor and educator Moses Farmer.

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Sarah had founded a summer conference there in 1894 — initially as an interfaith gathering for the new century — and had embraced the Bahá'í Faith on her own pilgrimage to 'Akká in 1900. She had then deeded the property over to the developing American Bahá'í community.

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By 1915 Green Acre had become the principal summer institution of the American Faith. The 1915 program, set out in detail in the *Star's* August notice, had run from late June through early September. It had featured talks by visiting teachers — Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl in earlier years, and in 1915 several of the prominent American believers including Howard MacNutt, Lua Getsinger, and the visiting Persian teacher Jenabe Fadel. There had been daily classes on the basic teachings of the Faith.

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There had been study circles on the recent Tablets of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. There had been morning devotionals in the open air on the great porch of the inn.

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The character of the gathering — what the *Star's* editors considered worth lifting up at the centre of their notice — was not its religious instruction alone but its quality of welcome.

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> Green Acre is a place where every soul of every faith > finds welcome.

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The phrase came from one of Sarah Farmer's earliest addresses to the gathering and had become the keynote of the property in subsequent years. The summer attendees in 1915 included not only Bahá'ís but Vedantists, Theosophists, Universalists, Quakers, and a number of seekers without any declared affiliation. They ate at common tables. They attended each other's morning devotions when invited. They walked the long pine paths together in the evenings.

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The deep work of Green Acre, as both the *Star* and Sarah Farmer herself had understood from the beginning, was not the formal instruction but the patient daily work of friendship across belief lines. Many of the seekers who later embraced the Bahá'í Faith named a Green Acre summer as the place where the conversion had quietly begun. The 1915 program — like every summer before it and after it — ran on that principle.

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Green Acre would persist through the changes of the twentieth century, would survive Sarah Farmer's own death in 1916, and would continue, into the present, as the oldest active Bahá'í summer school in the world.

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