The Threefold Community: A Crossroads for Anthroposophy at Work

by Bill Day

If American anthroposophists ever declare a Founders’ Day–our own Fourth of July or Bastille Day–then July 8, 1933 would be an appropriate landmark date.

On that evening, a crowd gathered under a tent at Threefold Farm in Spring Valley, New York, to hear Dr. Christoph Linder present a lecture titled “Introduction to Anthroposophical Medical Science,” thus inaugurating the first Anthroposophical Summer Conference at Threefold Farm.

The setting at Threefold Farm was rustic, to say the least. The only house on the property, today known as the Threefold Main House, comprised just three rooms (two upstairs and one down), plus some insubstantial additions suitable only for summer use. Most visitors slept in tents (room and board for the two weeks: $13.00), and the “lecture hall” was an extra-large tent, pitched under the trees behind the Main House, where the Holder House parking lot is today.

Threefold Main House then...

... and 2009

The stars of the conference were three prominent European anthroposophists (below) on their first visit to America: Ernst Lehrs, Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, and Maria Röschl. Röschl and Lehrs both taught at the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart; Röschl was the first leader of the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science; and Pfeiffer headed the research laboratories at the Goetheanum. Over the two weeks from July 8 to July 23 they gave lectures and led discussions on medicine (Pfeiffer); social science, economics, and social threefolding (Lehrs and Pfeiffer); pedagogy (Röschl); spirituality (Röschl and Lehrs); and biodynamics (Pfeiffer).

Ernst Lehrs

Maria Röschl

Ehrenfried Pfeiffer

Luminaries from the New York anthroposophical community, such as Miriam Wallace (a eurythmist who had studied under Marie Steiner) and Ralph Courtney (an evangelist for social threefolding), filled out the faculty, and the program also included daily painting lessons and ample time for discussion, swimming in the pond, and walking in the surrounding woods and hills.

The brochure announcing the summer conference had proclaimed: “There is only one Spiritual Movement today which claims to have new spiritual and material knowledge on which to base a solution of present-day problems. This is the Spiritual Science, or Anthroposophy, of the late Dr. Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophy makes definite statements as to new social arrangements (a decentralized threefold commonwealth), new art forms, scientific and medical knowledge, new agricultural methods and gives much information concerning spiritual forces of which this world is the outer expression.”

A“Spiritual Movement . . . on which to base a solution of present-day problems” —a phrase that can easily slip by unnoticed. But if we circle back and reexamine it, we see something that looks more unusual the longer we study it. What do most spiritual movements offer, in 1933 or in 2009? More often than not, a pathway to reduced personal discomfort: less anxiety, more compliant children or spouse, relief from personal shortcomings, some narrow notion of happiness. What did the Threefold Group offer to attendees of their summer conference? A whole new “social arrangement,” with new art, science, medicine, and agriculture to boot, challenging all comers to lift their aspirations above self-interest. Just to make it extra-real, the conference took place in a setting that doubled as a laboratory for testing and applying these new ideas: “The Farm belongs to anthroposophists who are experimenting with the social ideas of the new Steiner philosophy. They are also using the Steiner agricultural methods which do away with the use of poisonous sprays and mineral fertilizers.”

The Threefold Group was not the first association of anthroposophists in America; it was preceded by the St. Mark’s Group, founded in 1910. Threefold Farm was only an outpost, the Threefold Group’s home base being 318 West 56th Street in New York City, where they operated a restaurant, a rooming house, a laundry, and a furniture shop. Many Threefold members had encountered anthroposophy and even met Rudolf Steiner personally while traveling in Europe, and were at or near the origins of many anthroposophical impulses in the arts, education, medicine, and agriculture. They all shared a heartfelt commitment to bringing anthroposophical ideals to life in the social fabric of the New World, and Threefold Farm was integral to this impulse.

Ralph Courtney

Ralph Courtney, the Threefold Group’s founding father and guiding light, met Steiner in 1921 while working in Europe for the New York Herald Tribune. Soon after his conversations with Steiner, Courtney returned to the U.S. and acquired a circle of anthroposophist friends through meetings of the St. Mark’s Group. Among these were the founding members of the Threefold Group: Gladys Barnett (later Hahn), Louise Bybee, Charlotte Parker, Margaret Peckham, Alice Jansen, and Reinhardt Mueller; together, they dedicated themselves to the practice and application of anthroposophical ideals in all facets of life, both spiritual and material.

The zeal of the Threefold members who put on the 1933 conference can be directly tied to the urgency that Rudolf Steiner expressed, particularly regarding the social question, starting in 1919. At the Christmas conference of 1923, for example, he said:

Now you might say that the progress of mankind has always gone forward at a slow pace …. However, with civilization in its present brittle and easily destructible state, it could very well happen that in fifty or seventy-five years’ time the chance will have been missed for achieving what so urgently needs to be achieved.... I am convinced that if it were possible for us to create the necessary equipment and the necessary institutes and to have the necessary colleagues, as many as possible to work out of this spirit, then we could succeed in achieving in five or ten years what will now take us fifty or seventy-five years. The only thing we would need for this work would be 50 or 75 million francs. Then we would probably be able to do the work in a tenth of the time. (The Christmas Conference, p.209).

In its work the Threefold Group expressed its will to bring together the “necessary equipment … institutes … and … colleagues” to catalyze and bring to life a community where, as Steiner put it, “real cooperation continually renews social forces.”

Within a few years of the first conference, a “Summer Season” of activities ran from early June to Labor Day, with a summer school running for three weeks in July. With the exception of two or three summers during the Second World War, anthroposophical summer conferences have been held at Threefold every year since 1933.

The early conferences featured lecturers from Europe who had known and studied under Rudolf Steiner, many of whom gave their first American lectures at Threefold Farm. Attendees (who numbered in the hundreds) slept in self-described “shacks” and ate and attended lectures under rented circus tents, while eurythmy and dramatic performances were staged amongst the trees of the nearby oak grove. They also enjoyed swimming in Threefold Pond (a summer pleasure to this day), and meditative walks in the neighboring fields and forests.

Meanwhile, the community expanded, both physically and experimentally. The 200-seat Threefold Auditorium (above and below), dedicated in 1949, gave lectures and performances an indoor home, while experiments in economics (Threefold printed its own currency in the 1930s; see cover) and land ownership were carried out in the community’s living laboratory.

The Biodynamic Association, which was founded partly by the tireless Ehrenfried Pfeiffer in 1938, held its annual meeting at Threefold every year from 1948 until 1980, although as early as 1961 Evelyn Gregg reported that “the Conferences have outgrown the facilities of Threefold Farm and only those who apply early can now find accommodations there.”

Programs from the 1960s show a growing youth orientation in conference programming, a trend that culminated with “Self-Development and Social Responsibility,” a remarkable international youth conference that drew some 600 participants from throughout the U.S. and Europe in August 1970. In 1986, the Waldorf Institute, a Detroit-based Waldorf teacher-training school, relocated to the Threefold campus and took on the name Sunbridge College. Sunbridge’s popular summer programs for Waldorf teachers carry on the Threefold tradition of summer adult education in the service of anthroposophy.

Thousands of lives have been touched, directly and indirectly, by the work done over the years at Threefold. To take just one example: It was almost by chance that Henry Barnes, age twenty-one, found himself at the 1933 summer conference, knowing nothing of Rudolf Steiner yet following his destiny with an open heart. Within months of the conference, Henry was in Stuttgart to train as a Waldorf teacher. In 1940 he returned to the United States and took a position at the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City, where he remained for thirty-seven years (with a three-year break for wartime Army service), including twenty-eight years as faculty chair. Upon his retirement in 1978, Henry moved to Harlemville, New York, where he helped found and foster the Hawthorne Valley Farm and School Association, the wellspring of Hawthorne Valley School and Hawthorne Valley Farm. Henry served as General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society and was also active in the Waldorf education movement.

Along with countless articles, he wrote two books: a biography of Rudolf Steiner (A Life for the Spirit: Rudolf Steiner in the Crosscurrents of Our Time, 1997) and a history of the American anthroposophical movement (Into the Heart’s Land: A Century of Rudolf Steiner’s Work in North America, 2005).

Among his last projects, Henry helped conceive and plan a 2008 conference at Threefold to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1933 conference. The resulting Michaelmas conference, entitled “Honoring the Past–Recognizing the Way Forward,” was inspired by Henry’s life, work, and spirit, particularly his steadfast advocacy for research: the work that will make manifest the real benefits of having a spiritual basis for our work in the sense-perceptible world. Rudolf Steiner highlighted the need for this research in these remarks (offered vis-à-vis scientific research presented by Lily Kolisko): “Today there is an abyss between art and science; but within science, too, there is an abyss between, for instance, physiology and physics. All these abysses will be bridged if scientific work is done in the right way in our circles. Therefore from a general anthroposophical point of view we must interest ourselves in these different things as much as our knowledge and capacities will allow.”

In a piece from the early 1990s entitled “Rudolf Steiner on the Urgent Need for Research Arising from Anthroposophy,” Henry called on every institution and endeavor based in anthroposophy to set aside resources for this research, writing, “We must find the way to work for future values (the purpose of all genuine research), while meeting the immediate demands of today, tomorrow, and the next day.” He acknowledged that it’s not easy, but he also insisted that it is essential if our institutions are to grow and prosper, not just as fine schools or communities or farms, but as active expressions of a spiritual impulse to bridge the abysses created by old, reductionist ways of thinking. This is the path to a “Spiritual Movement on which to base a solution of present-day problems.”

Henry crossed the threshold just a week before the 2008 conference, but his spirit permeated the gathering, embodied in his life of service to the ideals of anthroposophy.

This, the seventy-sixth year of conferences at Threefold, is especially rich and varied. In January, “The New Agriculture Course” offered in-depth study of the foundational document of biodynamics. In August, “Inner Transformation and Social Renewal” investigated the spiritual capacities we must develop to address today’s crises and create a political, economic, and cultural life for the future. Then the Threefold Mystery Drama Group’s presented “The Portal of Initiation and Its Relationship to Goethe’s Fairy Tale.” The Threefold Community’s Michaelmas festivals and a pre-conference gathering of organizations working out of anthroposophy lead up to Threefold’s hosting of the annual conference and members’ meeting (AGM) of the Anthroposophical Society in America from October 2-4, 2009. Linking these busy weeks is “Transforming Capacities,” an art and science exhibit which opened in August and closes with the AGM. Information about Threefold events and a sign-up button for an e-newsletter can be found at www.threefold.org

Bill Day serves as development coordinator for the Threefold Educational Center in Chestnut Ridge, NY. See below, and Torin Finser’s letter on page 33, for more recollections of Threefold.

“Tea Table - Three Fold Farm”