Needmore An Intentional Community
~ 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
Time spent among friends and former strangers.
54 Our Brown County • Nov./ Dec. 2024 courtesy John Sisson courtesy John Sisson
Music was shared often at Needmore, from a stage and up close.
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.