The garden, still tended today, was a present they sorely needed since they were broke after Hawthorne failed to secure a refund upon quitting the nearby utopian community Brook Farm.

BBC: An American pilgrimage to Concord

Isaac has told Henry how he lived for a time among the philosophers at Brook Farm and then at Fruitlands, but now he says he cannot be driven from the certainty of his books.

NPR: Excerpt: 'Woodsburner'

In an hour (or two, with traffic) you'll reach a cluster of former farm villages called Oak Brook, Lisle and Naperville.

FORBES: The great suburban overbuild

Dr. Gowden later told me that he found me shy and difficult to talk to, but if I appeared timid to him it was because I was not used to dealing with people apart from my family and the three servants: Paddy, my nanny Kitty Lee, and Norah Maloney, a cheerful woman who lived on a farm in the hills behind Brook Lodge.

NPR: Cockburn's 'Broken Boy,' a Memoir of Survival

And so now, after a long odyssey, the product that stands for farm-town virtue is managed from Rye Brook, near New York city.

ECONOMIST: Nebraska��s Kool-Aid test