For many years before we bought it, Breitenbush was a ghost town of 100 buildings. It was very quiet, overgrown and populated only by forest, ferns, and furry creatures. When we purchased the property in 1977, there was no electricity, no heat in the buildings, no drinking water (except the river), no septic system, and no communications to the outside world. We had two primary missions: make the place habitable so we could live here, and establish the philosophical and ethical basis for the community we wanted to create. We worked hard for years, with no pay, to accomplish it.
These two missions—one physical, the other metaphysical—were our focus of life for the first few years, a time known as the Pioneer Period. We drilled geothermal wells and installed downhole heat exchangers to bring the heat of the hot springs to our buildings; we built a dam, flume and power house, reconditioned the 1895 cast-iron turbine, and created electricity from the river. We cleared four acres of forest and installed the biggest leach field in Marion County, and created clean domestic water from the river, and brought all of these utilities together into the buildings. It was a monumental effort.
In those same years, we developed the culture of Breitenbush. The Breitenbush Credo and Mission were crafted by consensus early on, and these foundation documents helped shape the evolving culture of our Breitenbush Community Co-op. Living in the isolation of wilderness with the hot springs added immeasurably to the exploration of those human potentials described in the Credo and Mission. For more than 40 years, Breitenbush has offered experiences and programming that provide inquiries, methods and tools for discovery to many thousands of guests and our co-op workers.
It is our view that these opportunities to “renew and evolve,” are a continuous need for human beings to adapt and evolve within the stressful complexities of our culture. Breitenbush is a place to bring life into balance, where we discover meaning in it all.
–Peter Moore, Original founding member and current Business Director
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