In 1959 they established the Argenta Friends School, a boarding school where the students often lived with the teachers and learned homesteading skills like milking cows, chopping firewood, gardening and cooking on a wood stove. A micro-hydro plant provided electricity to a significant number of households and a community freezer preserved much of the food that people produced themselves.

In the 1960’s and 70’s, the Quakers welcomed Vietnam War draft dodgers and resisters and the Back-to-the-Land movement was in full swing. Coupled with the hippie movement, Argenta was a vibrant, politically active community with almost a cosmopolitan atmosphere in a rural area!

The Argenta Friends School closed in 1982, but the community has stayed intact and retains a very peaceful, natural quality. Some development is threatening the area. Last summer, the Argenta Friends School held a reunion and it was amazing to see what the students are doing in the world today and how deeply effected they were by their experience at the Friends School and in Argenta. The alumnae work around the world engaged in professions as diverse as a World Bank economist, an archeologist, a PhD in populations biology, UN development work in Kenya, East Africa, and an international labour organizer.