It’s been about a year and half since flames spread from an adjacent property and consumed a building on the Twin Oaks Community property that housed its hammock business — one of the intentional community’s main revenue generators. Though it’d been outstripped by marketing and sales work connected to the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, an heirloom seed business at the nearby Acorn Community Farm, hammocks for decades had served as an external avatar for the rural enclave.
“Twin Oaks started with that building right there, that little white farmhouse and 40 acres,” Tom Freeman said, discussing the community’s fiscal reliance on hammocks, prior to developing other revenue sources. “When you look at what we have today — our residences, the money in the bank, the infrastructure we have, the land we have, now close to 600 acres — it all came from hammocks.”
Some hammocks are still floating around online for purchase, but the Louisa County collective realized replacing the business’ infrastructure wasn’t financially realistic, said Freeman, who goes by the name “Tigger.” He added that there’d been a decision before the fire to forego buying insurance and instead pile that money into a rainy-day fund. Twin Oakers just hadn’t had enough time for that pot of money to grow before the fire.
The community of about 100 people isn’t frustrated, though, Tigger said. He just hoped the man sentenced in the fire would offer reasonable remuneration.
Tigger also wanted to give him grace.
“Ruminating on it and dwelling on it isn't going to bring it back,” Tigger said about the lost property. “One of the few bright spots of losing the hammock business is that Twin Oaks sometimes gets trapped in, ‘This is what we've done. This is what we'll continue to do.’ The reality was that the hammock business was declining. But so many people here had such strong feelings about it, because it did build the community, that it was hard to let go.”
Tigger grew up in Hampton Roads, after immigrating from Scotland as a child. And when his friends from college moved to Twin Oaks in the 1990s, he followed suit. It’s been about 30 years since he first arrived at the community, and while there’s been significant change — both within the commune and across the rest of the world — Tigger sees Twin Oaks’ founding premise as being unchanged.
“How do I come to a place and live my values with a bunch of other people living their values, and how do we do it in a way that brings out those values in the best of us?” he said, walking down a wooded path, snaking its way through the property. “That's the experiment, and it's been going on since 1967.”
His days are a combination of working in the tofu hut — the name Twin Oakers use to refer to the tofu production building — cooking for the community and helping to manage its books. Tigger’s a self-described communist, and despite living outside of the American mainstream for half his life, he still values the structure of a good spreadsheet.
“The difference is out there you get, hopefully, paid enough to make it worth your while. To pay for other things that bring you joy. And in here, we are all choosing to live simply,” he said. “What we have is … a garden where we have people whose joy is to grow our own food. So, we got broccoli, we got cabbage, we got carrots growing now…. And we're eating food that was picked that day by the people we live with. We get to have that amazing experience. How do you put dollar amounts on that?”
Each adult resident living at Twin Oaks is required to do 38.5 hours of work each week. But folks who live there, for the most part, can decide how that time’s spent. Farming and childcare each are valued — and credited — in the same way there. And so is tofu production, though, since the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there haven’t always been enough people volunteering to keep up with demand. Tigger said they can sell more than they can produce at this point.
When Kat Kinkade and a group of seven others began the community in the late ’60s, it was during a time in American life when people were headed back to the land, looking for ways to live communally and with intention. Kinkade, in addition to Twin Oaks, would also help establish Acorn and the East Wind Community in Missouri.
At Twin Oaks, they employed a “Planner-Manager decision-making model” described in Walden 2, a utopian novel written by sociologist B.F. Skinner in 1948. The arrangement gave the commune rotating leadership, but one restrained by members’ desires. Kinkade would move in and out of the community over time, though she returned to live out her final days in 2008. She’s buried on the property.
While decision-making is shared among residents, having structured governance likely has contributed to the enclave persevering, while other similar communities dispersed, said Monica Bhatia, a sociology professor at Washington State University.
Other aspects unique to the Louisa collective, like being rooted in feminism, also contributed.
“I definitely think that Twin Oaks’ labor system as a whole — of which egalitarianism is a fundamental part — is one of the reasons that Twin Oaks has persisted,” said Bhatia, who previously stayed at the community on two separate occasions. “[I]t's one of the longest-lasting communes that came out of that time period.”
That sort of populist framework has contributed to community members standing up a pottery business to supplement lost income from shutting down hammock production.
Zoe Damle doesn’t call herself a ceramicist, but after pottery wheels, a kiln, 700 pounds of clay, glaze and hundreds of finished pieces were donated to the community, she and Naomi Graf, decided to build out Twin Oaks Ceramics.
She’s learning the craft through Youtube videos.
“The Twin Oaks Way is adapting and making due with what you've got,” Damle said. “I think that's what we're doing and trying to build this business.”
Tigger, who’s lived at Twin Oaks longer than Damle’s been alive, likely won’t be a part of that new initiative. He’s realized that the community can — and should have — various divergent paths.
“I feel that I'm seeing the younger generation being how I was when I first came here. You know, I knew better. I had all these great ideas and I thought if we implemented them, Twin Oaks would be so much better,” he recalled. “But the best idea is listening to each other and the best idea is accepting each other. Sometimes, you're going to have to accept things that you don't really like because they bring joy to somebody else.”
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.