![]() ![]() “We were really unsure if we were going to survive,” said Rachel Wright-Summerton, 72, the eldest daughter of the founder’s nine children. The commune-supporting sawmill had gone bust. Its founder and spiritual leader had died. Yet long after public scrutiny faded, Padanaram after the turn of the millennium found itself facing an existential crisis. Many reporters visited, with one story noting they’d been accused of everything from communism to wife-swapping to “trips on dope.” Rumors flew that they were hippies, Jesus freaks or some kind of cult. Homebirthed children named Thor, Viking, Camelot and Godson rode horses bareback and fished in ponds. ![]() Men in overalls cut timber at a commune sawmill, its profits funding a cafeteria, nursery and school. In its heyday, as many as 200 lived, ate and worked together in the secluded village of rough-hewn lodges, outhouses and dirt roads. ![]() Aram Wright tells the group that the “paycheck for a communal life” hasn’t diminished despite generations of struggle.įor five decades, the road to utopia has led here, past remote Indiana cornfields about 80 miles northwest of Louisville, to the spot where his father Daniel Wright, a charismatic, gray-bearded minister and “benevolent patriarch,” had a mystical vision that led him to create the commune of Padanaram, named after a biblical homeland. One man breaks the quiet to talk about an injury and his faith. Inside a darkened building with faded 1970s photos on the wall, a single bulb on a chandelier made of branches and canning jars casts a dim light on two rows of folding chairs arranged in a square.Ī group of residents, their lives woven together for generations, sit in silence. It’s a summer night in God’s Valley, and the sun is slipping behind forested Indiana hillsides that hide a cluster of secluded timber lodges, their peaked roofs resembling giant Swiss chalets. ![]()
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