11 minute read
Needmore, An Intentional Community
Music was shared often at Needmore, from a stage and up close. courtesy John Sisson
~by Boris Ladwig
At the end of the 1960s, a tumultuous time of racial strife during the Vietnam War and after assassinations of prominent political leaders including JFK and MLK, a small group of hippies, including an heiress to the Eli Lilly fortune, created an intentional community in Brown County. Known in those days as a commune, the project attracted Hoosiers who were interested in living off the land, as well as prominent counter-culture figures such as Rennie Davis of the Chicago 7. Eventually the commune also drew interest from the FBI and the Ku Klux Klan.
Needmore, a community northwest of Nashville, was created by Kathy Canada, granddaughter of Lilly, and her husband, Larry Canada, an anti-war activist and Bloomington business owner.
In its heyday, known later primarily for tax purposes, as Kneadmore Life Community Church, the community included more than 100 residents, some of whom lived in houses with electricity and running water, while others slept in trucks and teepees. Most of the long-term residents shared an interest in homesteading and rebelling against the establishment.
“There was a back-to-the-land movement, getout-of-the-system, be self-sufficient, grow your own food—a long way from [a] Jeffersonian yeoman, but as close as we were going to get,” said Guy Loftman, a retired Bloomington attorney who lived in the commune in the early 1970s.
Loftman and three others who lived in the commune—some a few years, others for more than a decade—said they still look back upon those days with fondness and have continued to pursue the ideals that brought them to join the community.
Guy Loftman
Loftman said he and his wife, Connie, got introduced to the Canadas when Needmore was still just an idea. The Loftmans moved into the commune in the early days, when the Canadas were still buying land.
Loftman was working in the hospital and his wife at the university. He said his conscientious objector status required him to remain an employee, so he had a bit of an extra incentive to remain on the more straight-and-narrow side of the Needmore hippies.
“We were just hippies with jobs,” he said.
But they agreed with the prevailing attitudes of people in Needmore.
“It really was dropping out…you tune into the counterculture and you drop out of the primary culture and find a new way of being,” he said.
When they weren’t working, the Loftmans spent time with the other Needmore hippies to play music, sing, chant, smoke weed, and dance.
The Loftmans and others also learned how to prepare food: Loftman learned how to kill, clean, cut and cook rabbits. Someone else taught them about goats.
The only rule in Needmore, Loftman said, was that there were no rules, which sounded good in theory, but did not work so well in practice.
In spring 1970, Loftman organized an effort to create a community garden. The community agreed to use newspapers for mulch, though one objector said he worried about toxic chemicals. Loftman brought a pickup truck load of old Herald-Telephone editions, and on a spring morning dropped the papers between the garden rows.
“After I’ve done a couple hundred yards of it, I look up and there’s this guy who’s against it, picking them all up and putting them back in my pickup truck,” Loftman said.
He called a community meeting, but the consensus was that there was nothing that could be done, because the only rule in Needmore was that there were no rules.
The community grew some food, he said, including tomatoes, corn, beans and squash, but disagreements such as the one about mulch and the lack of proper equipment (no one had a tractor) significantly reduced the size of the harvests.
“We never got close to sustaining ourselves, but it was fun to grow our own food,” Loftman said.
John Barnes
John Barnes was living in Bloomington with his wife, Janet, who had just graduated from Indiana University with a degree in elementary education, when someone told them about Needmore. Larry Canada invited them to live there after he interviewed them.
Barnes said the couple liked Needmore because of the people and their ideas.
Barnes and his wife lived in several houses on the property while Barnes did carpentry work and his wife worked as a bookkeeper in the Canadas’ Raintree Investments office. Barnes said he helped build houses, gardens, a shower house and a dock at the lake. He also had a lawn mowing business for a while, and his wife waitressed in Nashville.
The couple eventually built a 1,000-square-foot house in 1975 for $8,000 with Barnes doing most of the work. A contractor laid the foundation, and in return Barnes mowed the contractor’s yard all summer. Another contractor hung the drywall, and the couple paid him with a stained-glass lamp made by Barnes’ wife. Barnes said he only paid for someone to put up the gutters.
Barnes turned the experience he gained building the house into a business, opening a cabinet shop in 1976.
He said the couple lived comfortably, with electricity, running water and a gas stove. That comfort helped overcome some harsh conditions.
“We had some very interesting winters,” he said.
Barnes also got arrested once for growing marijuana plants that police had spotted from a helicopter. A justice of the peace in Brown County allowed him to plead guilty to a misdemeanor.
A few days later, on Oct. 7, 1971, Barnes received a mailing from the United Klans of America, in Greenwood, Indiana. It read, “The eyes of the Klan ARE ON YOU.”
“It’s kind of scary when you’re 20, you know, get a letter from the Klan,” Barnes said.
“When I got the letter, I sat out on my porch one night with a shotgun…then I realized that’s what they wanted me to do, is to be afraid.”
Bill Land
Bill Land lived in Brown County in the mid-1960s and read Kathy Canada’s columns about organic gardening, living off the grid and homesteading in the Brown County Democrat.
“That really appealed to me. I was very much a naturalist,” said Land.
He and his then-wife, Joan, hung out with the Canadas before they moved into the Needmore community in the mid-1970s.
The couple and their three children occupied a 28-foot geodesic dome and raised goats in Needmore, while Land also taught geography at universities, including a tenured position at Butler University.
The family’s home had neither electricity nor water, and they had to get water from a tap about a quarter mile away next to a set of concrete buildings where they also could take showers and wash clothes.
While people paid small amounts of money to live in the community, Needmore ran into serious financial difficulties, prompting the sale of about half the land, in part to help pay property taxes, Land said. In addition, people could not get bank loans to build homes because they did not own the land.
The Lands bought 20 acres in the area and created an egalitarian community, called Chrysalis, which, at its height, had nine people living in it.
Land said the family loved their time in Needmore, living off the land, raising goats, riding horses, listening to music, and spending time with friends.
Rhonda Roehm
Rhonda Roehm, a Fort Wayne native who had come to the area to study at Indiana University, said she and her boyfriend used to visit the Canadas’ house on Lanham Ridge Road on the weekends in the fall of 1967 when the couple was making plans for the community.
“Everything any of us did at that time was for raising consciousness and awareness. That was the main thrust of everything that happened there,” she said.
Even taking drugs served to raise one’s consciousness, Roehm said.
Roehm traveled to other countries at the time and visited Spain in spring 1968.
“It was like this craving…to travel and get to know other cultures. Because once you do that, you don’t want to bomb them…and they don’t want to bomb you,” she said.
She moved into Needmore when she returned from Europe. Some people lived in houses, and others in tents and a yurt. Roehm said she and a boyfriend built a teepee, which was “fabulous” in part because it had all kinds of methods of dealing with weather.
“The teepee itself was the most beautiful place I had ever lived,” she said.
Roehm worked for the Canadas’ real estate office for a while, but people often simply “did what the day brought.”
That meant finding food, cooking, baking, picking strawberries, trading those with someone who churned butter, or hitchhiking to the university to take a shower.
“It all fell together, and people helped each other,” she said. “Everybody helped with food. If you didn’t have food, you could always get a meal.”
Roehm also briefly lived with the Loftmans and said they taught her all about morel hunting.
“People think it was sex and drugs and rock n roll,” she said. “They think that that’s all it was, and that wasn’t what it was…this was sacred. We hung out with our friends. That’s what we did a lot of the day.”
Roehm said she most valued the attitude of accepting everyone. It was about seeing “the beauty in someone else’s soul and allowing them to be the way they want as long as they’re not hurting other people.”
Why they left
Loftman left after Canada returned from the 1971 May Day protest against the Vietnam War and brought back two groups of people: Poor urban hippies from Washington, D.C., many of them African American, and Vietnam veterans against the war.
The Loftmans’ house was right by a road, and before long, they would see vehicles drive by very slowly, with men glowering at them, carrying rifles and shotguns.
Then came arsons, burned teepees, and a cross burning.
One night, a mixed-race couple snuck across a road, through the woods and to the Loftmans’ house, asking for refuge, which they gave.
“We kept vigil all night,” Loftman said.
He said he suspects things had gone farther than anybody expected. The community held a meeting to figure out how to respond, and some people wanted to arm themselves.
“Certainly wasn’t in line with me,” Loftman said. “And so we left.”
Loftman said he still views his time in Needmore as an “important declaration of alienation and withdrawal.”
Outside of Needmore, he said, he continued to pursue the ideals espoused by the community. He has served on the NAACP board for 25 years and is active in the Unitarian Universalist church board.
Loftman went to law school at IU and practiced law in Bloomington until his retirement.
Barnes said he left primarily for economic reasons.
The couple moved to Bloomington with their daughter, Julia, and later had a son, Matt. Barnes said he never ran out of work again. He operated Plum Creek Cabinets for 40 years before retiring. His wife, Janet, an elementary art teacher, died in February. The couple were married 53 years.
Looking back on their time in Needmore, Barnes said he is grateful for the experience.
Land said he left Needmore in 1984, a terrible year in which he lost both his parents and got divorced. It was a good marriage in many ways, he said, and the couple had four daughters, including three who were homesteaders during part of their lives.
Land said he loved the experience of living in Needmore.
Life at Needmore also appealed to his academic interests, which included sociology and the study of small groups, he said.
“It allowed me, almost, as a scientist, to live in my lab,” he said.
Roehm said she left the community after she took a trip with the Canadas and others to Colorado for a meditation retreat. She moved to Bloomington in 1972 with other people who were practicing meditation. She later moved into an ashram where she lived for more than a decade.
Roehm said she is enormously grateful to the Canadas.
“They did so much to help all of us…to expand our mind. It was spreading love and light,” she said.
As the ideals live on, so does the community itself. According to Brown County property records, the church still owns nearly 315 acres on 15 parcels.
