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Scott Nearing has been dead for 18 years, Helen Nearing for six.
Their inspiration, however, lives on with their lush gardens, the chalet-style home they built by hand on Maine’s rocky shore, and the carrying on of their life message.
The Nearings were pioneers of the back-to-the-land movement a half-century ago and thousands visited their home to learn about their lives, their organic gardens and their radical politics.
Years later, the Nearing homestead still attracts close to 2,000 visitors a year. Like those before them, today’s visitors travel here for inspiration, information or just plain old nostalgia.
Take John and Kathy Falato of Hillsdale, N.J., who are considering leaving the hubbub of northern New Jersey in a few years. They visited the homestead to get a feel for the Nearings’ lives – and to simply slow down.
“This is inspiring just to not feel so trapped by the world,” John Falato said as he admired the peaceful gardens, a gentle fog hovering over the ocean nearby.
The Nearing homestead, Forest Farm, is owned and operated by The Good Life Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to perpetuating the philosophies and lifestyles epitomized by Helen and Scott Nearing.
The Nearings led simple and purposeful lives, and were committed to social justice and peace. Their book “Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World” made them icons by inspiring legions of people to move to the country. More than 250,000 books are in print.
The Nearings abandoned city life in 1932 when they moved from a small apartment in New York City to a ramshackle farmhouse in Vermont.
They came to Maine in 1952 after buying roughly 130 acres for $33 an acre in the village of Harborside on Cape Rosier, a peninsula in the town of Brooksville overlooking Penobscot Bay.
They lived in an old farmhouse, tended to loads of gardens and lived sparingly. In time, they built a second house that would become Forest Farm. By then, Scott was 95, Helen was 74.
The Nearings always had visitors. They would put them to work in the gardens or on their buildings, and engaged in lively discussions ranging from tapping a maple tree to economic injustice.
Scott Nearing died in 1983, three weeks after he turned 100. His health was faltering and he was fasting – some say starving himself – when he died.
Helen Nearing continued the homestead until her death in 1995 at the age of 91 after her car struck a tree a few miles from her home.
Before she died, however, Helen had signed an agreement with a national land conservation group to keep the farm open to the public. The Good Life Center took control of the property in 1998.
Nowadays, the center hosts visitors five or six days a week and has a library of the Nearings’ works. It also has homesteading workshops on topics such as saving seeds from a garden or how to build a chair.
From June to September, the center holds weekly public meetings with guests who speak on topics as diverse as organic farming or poetry.
The farm itself is overseen by two stewards who live in the Nearing tradition, give tours and interpret Nearing writings.
Henry Zacchini and Rachel Glickman, this year’s stewards, said visitors come for various reasons: the organic farming, the homesteading model the center provides, the radical politics the Nearings espoused.
“I think for many people it has a sort of pilgrimage aspect,” Zacchini said.
That was the case for Anne H. Strout of Cape Elizabeth, who first read “The Good Life” more than a decade ago and came for the center’s “nurturing atmosphere.”
That atmosphere she speaks of includes a view of Penobscot Bay, the wildflowers, the bountiful vegetable gardens.
Strout knows she can’t live like the Nearings did, but nonetheless hopes to lead a simpler and more self-sufficient life. “They’ve been inspirations for lots of people,” she said.
Peter Roderick brought his wife and 20-year-old daughter from their home about an hour away in the town of Eddington. Roderick used to visit the Nearings once or twice a year in the ’70s.
He recalls watching Scott Nearing drive his tractor on the nearby beach to pick up rocks for the house they were building. He remembers Helen talking about jumping from the second-story window into deep snowbanks in the winter. He never left the farm empty-handed – the Nearings invariably gave him a head of lettuce the size of a pumpkin.
Roderick is still influenced by the Nearings’ life and self-sufficiency, and wants to share that with his wife and daughter – particularly his daughter, who is interested in owning her first home.
“I said, ‘Hey, I’ll bring you down to the Nearings and show you how to build a house that’s reasonably priced – if you’re willing to work hard,” he said.
The guest book at the farm provides a glimpse of other visitors. They come from New England, the South, the Midwest, California and Alaska. Some list their homes as Canada, Germany, England, Holland, Korea and Bangladesh.
“At last I’ve made it to Mecca,” one visitor wrote.
“Thanks for helping keep the Nearings’ spirit alive,” wrote another.
John and Kathy Falato, the couple from New Jersey, feel that spirit, too. This place is the opposite of their lives now.
She is an administrator at Columbia University, he is a public school teacher and football coach. They have five children and constantly juggle jobs, commutes, errands, traffic, bills, school activities and more.
Kathy Falato looks around at the trees and gardens and serenity.
“This has got an appeal,” she said. “That’s for sure.”
On the Net: Good Life Center: www.goodlife.org
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