Green Acre Baháʼí School
conference facility in Eliot, Maine, United States
Green Acre Baháʼí School is a conference facility in Eliot, Maine, in the United States, and is one of three leading institutions owned by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baháʼís of the United States. The name of the site has had various versions of "Green Acre" since before its founding in 1894 by Sarah Jane Farmer.
It had a prolonged process of progress and challenge while run by Farmer until about 1913 when she was indisposed after converting to the Baháʼí Faith in 1900. ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, then head of the religion, visited there during his travels in the West in 1912. Farmer died in 1916 and thereafter it had evolved into the quintessential Baháʼí school directly inspiring Louhelen Baháʼí School and Bosch Baháʼí School, the other two of the three schools owned by the national assembly, and today serves as a leading institution of the religion in America. It hosted diverse programs of study, presenters, and been a focus for dealing with racism in the United States through being a significant venue for Race Amity Conventions (later renamed Race Unity Day meetings) and less than a century later the Black Men's Gatherings and further events.
Origin
The Piscataqua River by which Green Acre Baháʼí school stands was named from Abenaki Native Americans of the Wabanaki Confederacy describing where a river separates into several parts – "a place where boats and canoes ascending the river together from its mouth were compelled to separate according to their several destinations." The town of Eliot was founded 1810 from Kittery, Maine, which itself was founded in the 1600s. By the mid-1800s the area served as a shipyard, including launching the USS Nightingale in 1851. At the time of the founding of the school there were some 1,400 people in Eliot and the town has grown in recent years to near 7,000 today.
The Farmers
Sarah Farmer's mother, Hannah Tobey Farmer (1823–1891) was raised Methodist.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5602256. Authority coordinates are 43.111, -70.794. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1894, 1913, 1900 and 1912.
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This entry incorporates text from “Green Acre Baháʼí School” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.