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.
Building a community shower house in the mid-1970s. courtesy John Barnes courtesy John Barnes
” We never got close to sustaining ourselves, but it was fun to grow our own food,”
— Guy Loftman
John Barnes, using his carpentry skills.
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
Continued on 56 Nov./ Dec. 2024 • Our Brown County 55