Atelier Editions, 2024. Softcover, 240pp., 7 x 9.5 inches

New

A record of the rise and fall of the BMC farm that foregrounds the voices of a new cast of character. 

David Silver's fascinating new book offers a new perspective on Black Mountain College. The farm was vital to BMC. Throughout the Depression and World War II it provided vital sustenance, while serving as a testing ground for self-sufficiency, communal living and collaboration--the most precious and precarious ingredient at the college.

Through deep original research, The Farm at Black Mountain College follows renegade students, faculty and farmers as they establish a campus farm in the 1930s, build a better farm in the 1940s and watch it all collapse in the 1950s. We meet a new cast of BMC characters whose stories have seldom, if ever, been explored, and whose adventures in agriculture illuminate what exactly happened at BMC across the decades, from optimistic community building to its plunge into substance-addled scarcity. In these engrossing pages, we encounter the extraordinary folk whose endeavors on the land helped shape the Black Mountain College of myth and extraordinary reality.

ISBN: 9781954957114