It has often been stated that Brook Farm was a well chosen location for the experiment made there. It was nine miles from Boston. There were no surrounding industries. There was no water power at hand, the little brook being too small for any purpose but ornament. There was no available railroad station--the nearest was four miles away. This necessitated the teaming of lumber, fertilizers, coal, family stores and all stock for manufacturing purposes, from Boston, as it was not practical to send part way by rail and transfer it to teams. A portion of the time we were obliged to go to the city by the way of West Roxbury Village, as the nearest way--over the hills--was blocked by snow during our long New England winters, and this increased the distance. One or two teams, with men, were ever on the road. This was expensive and tedious. After the manufacturing stock had been teamed thus far into the country, it was carted back in the shape of goods over the same road. I must praise the men who were engaged in this business, for they were not only teamsters, but errand boys--expressmen we would call them now--as well as purchasers of provender and general commercial agents of the Association; and their combined tasks were hard and difficult. Busy, driving Glover Drew and Buckley Hastings filled this office faithfully and long. For the original purpose of an industrial school the farm was attractive, but for an experiment such as was foreshadowed by the name Phalanx, the place was not at all fitted, and the good sense of Mr. Greeley saw that the domain of the North American Phalanx was vastly superior. In this connection I am reminded that there was but little machinery invented and employed on farms at the date of my narrative; and although our agriculturists, in spite of the stale jokes that have been fathered on them, were in the advance in this department as in others, it was only in the third or fourth year of their occupancy of the farm that they deemed it wise or prudent to purchase a horse rake, and I recall no other modern implement used, unless it was a seed drill, taken on trial. It was the same in the domestic department; there was not even a dish washer or a clothes wringer, and the most extensive and valuable aid in the laundry was a pounding barrel in which the soiled clothes were placed and put under discipline.