Green Acre Baháʼí School
[11]: pp.7, 163 Hannah established a memorial non-segregated service called "Rosemary Cottage" as a retreat for unwed or poor mothers and working women[11]: p.7 in Eliot where, for a donation of $7 ($181 in 2014,)[12] families would have a two-week vacation, up to 40 at a time in 1888.
"[7]: pp.193–4 The early collection of religious interests was wide - Farmer participated with Spiritualist trance-speakers who appeared to channel her father so convincingly the family dog responded, a fact William James took note of.
Professor Lewis G. Janes was there giving talks on "Darwin and Spencer", "Social Tendencies under Evolution" and "Life as a Fine Art"[29] and would also soon take a leading role in developments as well.
[37] The Monsalvat School for the Comparative Study of Religion, a progressive or liberal development seen against conservative religious experience, was established formally in 1896 as an institution hosted at Greenacre and the first director was Lewis Janes.
[11]: p.16 Prominent Buddhist monk Anagarika Dharmapala stayed at Greenacre where he worked on practices himself and offered classes and talks on specific meditational disciplines as well as quotes on the teachings of the Buddha.
[43] A diary of Charles W. Chesnutt noted he was a replacement speaker for Walter Hines Page for a talk in 1899 on the condition of African-Americans in the South, and commented on witnessing a diversity of clothing representing cultures of the world.
[51] Wilson and Farmer ran into friends Josephine Locke and Elizabeth Knudson aboard ship – and eventually learned they were on the way to see ʻAbdu'l-Bahá who was leader of a new religion and had in their possession an early prayer book.
A few facts are detailed - Farmer had met ʻAbdu'l-Bahá and accepted the religion on one occasion, and on another wanted to ask him a series of questions in the context of a review of her whole life - but when she wrote it all down she left the notebook in the hurry of being called to come to him in the early morning.
... Farmer's eventual acceptance of the Baha'i faith or "the Persian Revelation" ... discomfited her liberal, universalistic friends, many of whom preferred ongoing inquiry to actually finding one path to follow.
For Farmer, the vision that she found in the Baha'i faith of a new age of religious unity, racial reconciliation, gender equality, and global peace was the fulfillment of Transcendentalism's reform impulses and progressivism's millennial dreams.
To her skeptical associates, her turn to the Persian Revelation represented a betrayal of their deepest ideals as free-ranging seekers whose vision of a cosmopolitan piety dimmed at the prospect of one movement serving as a singular focus for the universal religion.
[76] Myron H. Phelps, as part of the transition of the Monsalvat School in his position as director in 1904 and 5[73] gave a talk on the religion at the 1904 conference following his 1903 book, (though it was later judged to be full of inaccuracies by the Baháʼís.
[83] In 1904 and 1905 Japanese diplomats visited Greenacre – Yokoyama Taikan, Okakura Kakuzō and Kentok Hori, signing Farmer's autograph book with quotations and drawings for a special tea service and presentations.
About 1905 a formal board to supervise Greenacre called the "Green Acre Fellowship" superseded the earlier voluntary one and was arranged with five trustees – Francis Keefe, Aldred E. Lunt, Horatio Dresser, Maria Wilson, and Fillmore Moore, (two were Baháʼí, three not.
In 1906 among others noted, then Third assistant Secretary of State Huntington Wilson, then retired General O. O. Howard, and Ex-Governor John Green Brady of Alaska all gave talks or hosted meetings.
[130] The talk was about ways of knowing the truth – he disavowed individual approaches like pure reason, simple authority, individual inspiration, etc., but affirmed: [A] statement presented to the mind accompanied by proofs which the senses can perceive to be correct, which the faculty of reason can accept, which is in accord with traditional authority and sanctioned by the promptings of the heart, can be adjudged and relied upon as perfectly correct, for it has been proved and tested by all the standards of judgment and found to be complete.
[203] The members of the Eliot local assembly were – Horace and Doris Holley, Kate Ives, Ivy Drew Edwards, Marion Jack, Colonel Henry and Mary Culver, Ella Roberts and Phillip Marangella.
[220] The Ober family purchased a home near Green Acre in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression,[221] and Harlan soon was reading on the radio at Portsmouth's WHEB station weekly after noon from spring into the fall from 1933 into 1935 (with occasional gaps).
[241] The Summer schedule at Green Acre went on[242] including Montford Mills, Louis G. Gregory, Manses L. Sato, Dorothy Beecher Baker, Mary Collison, Hishmat Alai, and featuring Stanwood Cobb.
[253] The 1939 season at Green Acre went on[254] with among the teachers Louis Gregory, and Horace Holley and officers of the program committee including Mrs. Harold Bowman, Ober, Lorna Tasker and Marjorie Wheeler; and there was a focus on discussing international problems.
[11]: p.166 In 1941 a trusteeship was created for Green Acre for the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States and Canada – its members were Allen McDaniel, Dorothy Baker, Roy Wilhelm, Horace Holley, Siegfried Scholpflocher, Leroy Ioas, Amelia Collings, Louis Gregory, Harlan Ober.
[292] A number of prominent Baháʼís were in a Green Acre "Race Amity" conference in August 1942 – Dorothy Beecher Baker, Matthew Bollock, Ali Kuli Khan, Mabel Jenkins, Harlan Ober, Lorna Tasker, Louis Gregory, Doris McKay, Hillery Thorne, and Harriet Kelsey were all on the speaker list.
[298] Ober was one among several present in an August series of talks at Green Acre – Mary Coristine, Philip Sprague, Lorraine Welsh, Lorna Tasker, Mary McClendon, Gertrude Atkinson, Louis Gregory, Horace Holley, Mrs. Florence Breed Khan, Hesmat Ala'i, Maud Mickle, and Mabel Jenkins all contributed on topics of equality of women and unity of humanity,[299] with the largest attendance of the season,[207]: p.278 partly from a nationwide call for the prominence of the topic,[207]: p.284 while the late August session also featured a review of the life of Muhammad.
[300] The National assembly had set in motion a series of efforts in anticipation of the Centenary of the Declaration of the Báb,[301] saying the situation of race in the country "demands our devoted attention and endeavor throughout September and October, the fundamental teaching of the Faith, its most challenging principle, its swift healing antidote for the ills of a divided world."
[10] Though talks were held in June 1949,[315] during the rest of 1949 and 1950 the executive decision was made by then head of the religion Shoghi Effendi to close Green Acre School for two years of "austerity" while the final push to finish the Baháʼí House of Worship was under way.
"[176] In 1920 the Gregories were able to spend some ten days together after many months each traveling in different directions for the religion amidst a time where inter-racial marriage was socially troubled and he was "so onerous and irritable, so unlike himself" that his wife was in despair over his condition - nevertheless he set out on the longest of his teaching tours the following year.
In particular Gregory carried on correspondence with U.S. District Court Judge Julius Waties Waring and his wife in 1950–51 who was involved in Briggs v. Elliott even while Green Acre was closed for austerity.
[10] Sessions began to be held preserving Green Acre history and in 1986 the National Spiritual Assembly made the restoration of the Sarah Farmer Inn a goal for the Baháʼís of the Northeast.
[341] Noted scholar on Khalil Gibran, Suheil Bushrui[342] spoke at Green Acre Baháʼí school in 2003 giving a two-day course on ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's teachings on peace.
[348] Green Acre was also reviewed in line with other movements of the turn of the 20th century in a documentary about peace activism related to the Treaty of Portsmouth[349] and was premiered on the campus in 2012 during the centenary of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's visit.
