Libre

Libre is a commune in Gardner, Colorado (Huerfano Valley), co-founded in 1968 by Peter Rabbit (Peter Douthit) and Dean Fleming, and described in the Douthit biography sources as the oldest continuously operating hippie commune in the country. It stands in the direct lineage of Drop City — its founder on camera calls it “majorly inspired by Drop City” — and it is the place where Doug Engelbart and Bill English of Stanford Research Institute traveled to meet Steve Baer, per Fred Turner’s academic history.

Founding and Drop City lineage

The Drop City documentary (c. 2002) contains a first-person founding account from a speaker filmed at Libre — tagged Speaker 20 in the transcript, unidentified in the archive’s sidecar, but consistent with Dean Fleming: his interview partner (Speaker 21) says “Drop City was something that Dean had heard about,” and Speaker 20 names Linda Fleming as “my wife at the time.” Standing on site, he says: “Well, we are in the community of Libre in Colorado. And this was the community that I started with friends in 1968, which was majorly inspired by Drop City.”

His account of the path there: he was building “the first gallery in Soho” in New York, where Bernie Kirschenbaum — “a student of Bucky Fuller” — showed domes; two of the original Drop City people came to New York and met him. As the gallery turned “more mainstream, kind of commercial,” he came out to Colorado with Linda Fleming and, “every single weekend for that year,” stayed at Drop City — “so we had a lot to do with it.” The Flemings hesitated to join Drop City itself because of its radical sharing rule (“you put your keys and your money and your clothing on the table… I said, I’m not ready for that much communal”), and founded Libre instead. On the debt to Drop City: “I don’t think it would have been so free or so unencumbered if it hadn’t been for Drop City’s example of just do it. Just put the stuff up, you know, and live in it.”

The two communities stayed connected: Clark Richert recalls his Drop City wedding was attended “by all the Drop City people, but also by the Libre people, being Linda Fleming and Peter Rabbit,” and Lloyd Kahn (probable speaker) describes stopping at Drop City “as we were heading up to Libre, which was in the mountains in Colorado.”

Libre in early 1969

A letter read aloud in the documentary, dated February 17, 1969, gives a contemporaneous snapshot from a Drop City resident: “I was up at Libre, a commune north of here. They have beautiful domes on their 200 acres. They really live rich up there. Each of their domes cost at least $2,000. And Dean has just been commissioned to do a sculpture. You can read about him in the last issue of Time magazine.” The contrast with Drop City’s poverty in the same period is explicit in the phrase “they really live rich up there.”

Passive solar at Libre

The founder’s on-camera description of his Libre dome is an early piece of lived passive-solar practice, in the same idiom as Baer’s work: “There’s like two feet of creek rocks in this room, and that collects heat during the day. And then it transmits the heat in the nighttime into the dome. So sometimes I felt it was almost like a saxophone or something — I’m going around opening, closing doors, different times of the day. As the sun comes over this way, I close the east doors and open the west doors. And you know, you get to play it, you know, like an instrument.” Rock thermal mass with manually managed air flow is the same family of ideas as Baer’s convective air loop rock storage system at Drop City.

The Engelbart and English visit

Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006), chapter 4, places Libre at a hinge point of the counterculture-computing convergence brokered by Stewart Brand:

“As members of the ARC group became more intrigued by the burgeoning commune movement, Brand helped bring the two communities together. Steve Durkee, of USCO and the Lama Foundation, began to visit the ARC offices. Doug Engelbart and Bill English later traveled to New Mexico and the Libre commune, where they met with Steve Baer, the Whole Earth Catalog’s foremost authority on geodesic domes.”

Engelbart directed SRI’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC); the visit is the archive’s strongest evidence that Baer was a destination figure for the Bay Area computing establishment, not merely a catalog entry. Bill English resurfaces in the same network in Brand’s Rolling Stone “Spacewar” article (December 1972), by then at Xerox describing the Dynabook — the same person who had traveled with Engelbart to meet Baer at Libre.

Geographic note: Turner’s text says the pair “traveled to New Mexico and the Libre commune,” and the archive’s own summaries of Turner have sometimes rendered this as a New Mexico commune. Every other source in the archive — the Douthit biography sources and the documentary speakers (“the community of Libre in Colorado”; “Libre, which was in the mountains in Colorado”) — places Libre in Gardner, Colorado, in the Huerfano Valley. Treat “New Mexico” in Turner as either a description of the broader trip or an error; the commune itself is in Colorado.

The Peter Rabbit years (1968–1979)

Peter Rabbit left Drop City in 1968 to co-found Libre with Dean Fleming and lived there until 1979. His son John Lawton Douthit died in a car accident during this period; at Libre he met poet Anne MacNaughton, with whom he had a son, Michael Amergin Douthit. In 1979 he was arrested for growing marijuana at Libre and served a year in prison, after which he returned to Taos.

Open questions

A World Journal article (“Libre Commune, Part 2”) names four co-founders: Dean Fleming, Linda Fleming, Peter Rabbit (Peter Douthit), and Judy (Peter Rabbit’s wife). The same article gives the acreage as 360 (vs. the Drop City documentary’s “200 acres”). Related Huerfano County communes named in the same source: Red Rockers (socialist, near Badito Cone), Anonymous Artists of America (below Slide Mountain), The Medical Opera (“La Clinica” in Gardner), and The Ortivez Farm (agriculture).
Speaker 20’s identification as Dean Fleming rests on transcript-internal evidence only; the documentary sidecar does not identify him.
No archive source dates the Engelbart/English visit precisely; the archive’s Baer timeline places it around fall 1969, alongside the Peradam gathering. A 2026-08-10 web search found no independent corroboration beyond Turner (2006).