Swami Vivekananda group photo Green Acre

Swami Vivekananda, Sarah Farmer (seated to his left), Charles Malloy (standing), with white hat and walking stick. This is yet another, heretofore unknown, picture of Swamiji seated under his pine with one of his classes. Elva Nelson acquired this photo, as well as 32, from the Baha’i Archives now located at Green Acre in Eliot, Maine. “On July 28 an article headed VIVEKANANDA AT GREENACRE appeared in Boston’s brahminical and world-famous Evening Transcript. It was almost certainly written by Ralph Waldo Trine, who was later to become a well-known author on metaphysical subjects. (At that time, he was a special correspondent for the Transcript at Greenacre, where he had built for himself ‘a little cabin . . . on the edge of a pinegrove.’) The article read in part: Friday an extra lecture will be given by Swami Vivekananda of India, who is spending a few weeks at Greenacre. He is deeply interested in this unitary work which has been inaugurated, and each morning may be seen, attired in his flowing red robes and yellow turban, sitting cross-legged on the ground near a wide-spreading pine, and surrounded by a group of eager listeners, men and women, to whom he pours out freely his treasures of knowledge and experience. It is a rich opportunity to us who are privileged to enjoy it, and our only regret is that so many hungry souls are missing it. Greenacre is very full, as are also a half-dozen or more cottages in the vicinity: still there is room. The townspeople are opening their rooms to accommodate the numbers who desire to attend the lectures, which are free to all.” ❊ ❊ ❊ On July 31 Swamiji wrote to the Hales’ daughters and nieces from the Green Acre Inn: “The Inn people are more or less well-to-do, and the camp people are healthy, young, sincere, and holy men and women. I teach them all Shivo’ham, Shivo’ham, and they all repeat it, innocent and pure as they are and brave beyond all bounds.” Later, in September 1894, Swamiji wrote a letter to Mr. Manmatha Nath Bhattacharya, who had been his host in Chennai in 1893. In this letter he mentioned: “A while back several hundred intellectual men and women were gathered in a place called Greenacre, and I was there for nearly two months. Every day I would sit in our Hindu fashion under a tree, and my followers and disciples would sit on the grass all around me. Every morning I would instruct them, and how earnest they were.”