Adin Ballou’s autobiography spans almost 90 years and over 500 pages. He lived a full, progressive, and important life. Born in 1803 on a farm in Cumberland, Rhode Island, Ballou pushed against his family’s beliefs and his father’s wishes that he remain on the family’s homestead. He had a spiritual vision and spent the rest of his life preaching and seeking a religion to meet his own ideas.

The founding of the Hopedale Community in 1842 was a group process, but also a way for Ballou to spread his new “Practical Christian” religion. Ballou and about 30 of his followers settled in the Old House on what would become Hopedale Street and began farming and creating industry. The utopian community lasted 15 years, one of the longest running “Associationist” communities in the United States. Only a financial shortfall and the interference of George Draper put the experiment to an end in 1856.

Adin Ballou stayed in Hopedale, building his own “meeting house” on the site of the current Unitarian church in 1860. The Hopedale Unitarian Parish formed on October 2, 1867 and included many of Ballou’s original Hopedale Community followers. Today, the Hopedale Unitarian Parish is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Adin Ballou is remembered for being the founder of Hopedale, but also for his “non-resistant” beliefs, the precursor of modern pacifism and the nonviolent resistant movement. Leo Tolstoy communicated with Ballou toward the end of his life, and through his and Tolstoy’s writings people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King brought Adin Ballou’s beliefs into the modern age.