David Silver's fascinating study offers a new perspective of the pioneering liberal arts school that was Black Mountain College (BMC). Throughout the Depression and World War II, the farm provided vital sustenance to the college's students and faculty while serving as a testing ground for self-sufficiency, communal living, and collaboration--the most precious ingredient at BMC.

The product of deep 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 characters whose stories have seldom if ever been explored, and whose adventures in agriculture illuminate exactly what happened at the renowned college across the decades: from optimistic community building to its plunge into substance-addled scarcity.