In the 1980s, Bob Lovelace, on a whim, bought a piece of land in Maine with some disability money. Today, he and his wife Arlene continue to live on a homestead on the same piece of land. The link below provides an indexed, transcripted, and segmented version of Bob Lovelace’s oral history: Bob Lovelace’s Oral History
The Story
Bob never made a conscious decision to move back-to-the-land. After dropping out of Springfield College, Bob convinced his girlfriend Arlene to hitchhike around the country with him. Growing up in a suburb in Massachusetts, Bob — like most suburban kids — had never know about homesteading as a potential lifestyle.
Hitchhiking around the country gave him an alternative view. “We got picked up by this couple…we went back to their land and they just had this little cabin out in the woods and they had these three beautiful kids and they ate brown rice and brewed beer and grew their own pot,” Bob recalls, citing the experience as his first exposure to homesteading.
Combining some saved money and some disability money, Bob bought a piece of land in Brighton, Maine. Initially, the property was just a place to hang out on the weekends or escape to in the event of a nuclear war (the `70s were a tumultuous time). Eventually, the two decided to try their hand at building a house, gardening, and a few other traditional homesteading ventures. They loved the community and the physical labor, so the weekend hang out eventually turned into their fulltime home.
In Bob’s interview, he talks about the different groups of people in the back-to-the-land movement, saying that although many did participate in the free-love aspect of the counterculture, his core friends were all monogamous, married couples. He also discusses gardening and food storage, the challenges of aging on a homestead, and the eventual decision to plug into the power grid.
Today, Bob and Arlene still run a homestead out of Brighton, ME, where Bob continues to grow and store and freeze the majority of their food.