Many persons interested in social betterment work, have written to me
enquiring about the Free Acres Colony at Berkeley Heights, N. J.
If you can get along without gas and a janitor and plumbing and a land
lord and other modern improvements, you can build your own one room
tent-shaped bungalow for $40 there, and make your own clothes and be as
respected as you are respectable. Later, you may make it your residence.
Any handy man or woman might make a living chopping wood, or gardening,
and so forth, and no one there will either give you anything or try to
take anything away from you; for in this co-operative land-ownership
there is no speculative element.
On a co-operative basis, Free Acres affords an opportunity to own a
rural home without having to buy land. But it is as secure as buying,
for the lease is a perpetual lease and can be transferred. At present it
is pioneering; there are no established industries there as yet, but
opportunity is open to anyone to establish them. You can lose yourself
in the woods which surround the farm, although it’s only twenty-seven
miles from the City Hall in New York.