The website Thrillist.com clearly has a sense of self, judging by its latest culture survey of U.S. towns with the greatest hippie attributes.
The Maine town meeting the definition is a place in coastal Waldo County called Unity, according to the widely followed media and entertainment website.
“With a name like Unity, you’ve set the hippie bar pretty high,” Thrillist’s Matt Meltzer says. “But this town lives up to it…”
Unity earns its hippie reputation thanks in part to the Maine Organic Farmers & Gardeners Association and the popular Common Ground Country Fair.
It’s also home to Unity Environmental University – the first in the U.S. to base its entire curriculum on sustainability that “naturally attracts a student body that tends to be a little more hippie,” says Jordan Verge of i95rocks.com.
Meltzer calls Unity Environmental University “the most liberal of liberal arts schools.”
Verge unearthed the Thrillist analysis, quipping that “Maine as a whole certainly enjoys its fair share of peace, love, and other hippie things.”
Thrillist put together its list of ‘The Most Hippie Towns in All 50 States’ by looking for places with strong countercultural vibes, from college towns full of free spirits to quiet communes and artsy enclaves.
Its writers leaned into the stereotypes, selecting each town as the one that best represents that state’s hippie spirit.
“Once upon a time, hippies were members of a flower-power counterculture that dropped acid, drove inexplicably operative VW buses, and protested the bejeezus out of the Greatest Generation,” reports Thrillist.com. “You may recognize them from those pictures you found of your parents that you really wish you could unsee.
“But you still know a hippie when you see one (or smell patchouli). Now, they range from free spirits on college campuses to mountain-dwelling stoners, boomers still living in the ’60s, and boomers-turned-yuppies who buy expensive art.”
The hippiest place in neighboring New Hampshire is Keene, which “for a city its size, boasts a surprisingly large number of vegan and vegetarian restaurants.”
Thrillist says Burlington, the Vermont city where Bernie Sanders built his first yurt, is the top hippie spit in that state, while Northampton took the hippie prize in Massachusetts.
“Massachusetts is already a liberal place, but most of it isn’t exactly what you’d call bohemian, especially when a rabid Sox fan is yelling obscenities in your face for going to Starbucks instead of Dunkin’,” says Thrillist’s Adam Lapetina. “But you won’t find that kind of noise in Northampton.”
Hippies are fine in my book, as long as they don’t vacuously support illiberal Marxo-fascist democrat nihilist politics. Sadly, most of them do–especially in the so-called “Boomer” generation.
Ummm, what’s left of Unity College is now down in New Gloucester, they sold the entire Unity campus for $6 million last June.
Unity became a hippie Mecca because land was cheap there the 70s, the Belfast, broiler industry imploded, and then I-95 bypass the town (the Waterville/Bangor Road went through Unity). I remember seeing for sale signs all over the place back then.