A Socialist commune in the SGV? Indeed: this street owes its name to Fellowship Farm, a 72 acre utopian colony built here in 1912. It was the brainchild of George Elmer Littlefield (1862-1947), a former Unitarian minister from Massachusetts who set up the first Fellowship Farm, a 75 acre property, in Westwood, MA in 1907. The arrangement there was that each of 40 contributing families owned one acre while the remaining 35 acres were cooperatively farmed. Subsequent communities in Kansas and New Jersey followed similar principles. I can’t say how long our Fellowship Farm lasted; newspapers began calling it “Maple Farms” – surely the source for Maplegrove Street – by 1929, and both names were used until the late 1940s, when tract housing started going up and the agrarian dream was over. As for George Littlefield, he and his wife Mary moved to Santa Barbara in 1920 to establish yet another Fellowship – their last, as it turns out. They either quit or were booted out two years later and the Santa Barbara Fellowship was dissolved in 1924. American attitudes towards Socialism had changed by the time Littlefield died: his effusive obituary in the Santa Barbara News-Press carefully avoided the word.
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