Now and then some benevolent philanthropist with means would make a donation.

No one who entered was expected to contribute his whole income to the general purse, unless such income would not more than cover the actual expense incurred for him.

When Isaac Hecker went to West Roxbury the establishment included seventy inmates, who were distributed in several buildings bearing such poetical names as the Hive, the Eyrie, the Nest, and so on.

The number rose to ninety or a hundred before he left them, but the additions seem occasionally to have been in the nature of subtractions also, taking away more of the cultivation, refinement, and general good feeling which had been the distinguishing character of the place, than they added by their money or their labor.
Isaac Hecker was never an actual member of that inner community of whose aspirations and convictions the Farm was intended as an embodiment.

He entered at first as a partial boarder, paying four dollars a week, and undertaking also the bread-making, which until then had been very badly done, as he writes to his mother.