Physically, Green Acre is a tract of some two hundred acres, situated along the banks of the Piscataqua river in Eliot, Maine, only four miles up from the sea, and opposite the historic city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On this tract, and also round about the countryside, are magnificent pine groves; the combination of river, sea, pines and sunswept rolling farm lands making an environment of unsurpassed charm and healthfulness.

The buildings already erected at Green Acre include the Inn, Fellowship House, Arts and Crafts Studio, Little Theatre, Gift Shop, Tea House, cottages and sites for camping parties. All this property is administered under the supervision of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada. No restrictions exist to limit the attendance at Green Acre beyond basic considerations of character and suitability.

The present year 1928 brings the thirty-fourth season of the famous Green Acre Conferences, which have resolutely stressed the independent investigation of reality in all the fundamental issues of human life. Such subjects as Comparative Religion, Religion and Science, The Unity of Mankind, and The Significance of the New Era, have been presented by leaders whose names are known throughout the world. It was typical of Miss Farmer’s large purposes, and also of her capacity to dramatize the ideal in the concrete, that the original ceremony opening Green Acre on July 4, 1894, culminated in raising a flag of World Peace.

Among those who have been associated with the development of Green Acre Conferences are: John Greenleaf Whittier, Edward Everett Hale, Edwin H. Markham, Ralph Waldo Trine, Helen Campbell, William Dean Howells, William Lloyd Garrison, John Fiske, Lester A. Ward, Paul Carus, Booker T. Washington, Edward Martin, Mírzá Abu’l-Faḍl, Edwin Ginn, Myron H. Phelps, Thornton Chase, Edwin D. Mead, C. H. A. Bjerregaard, Jacob Riis, Horatio Dresser, Joseph Jefferson, Anagarika H. Dharmapala, Nathaniel Schmidt, P. Ramanathan and Rabbi Silverman.

The audiences attending these Conferences have more than once had the disinction of hearing, in the form of an intimate address, some theme later to become famous as a public lecture or chapter in a book. For more than a decade, it was at Green Acre that Oriental philosophy and religion found their most hospitable open door into the consciousness of the West.

In 1896, two years after the opening of Green Acre, Miss Farmer found her objects and ideals expressed in their purest, most vital form in the Bahá’í Faith. Perceiving that the entire modern liberal movement of the West was but the direct reflection of the Light which dawned in Persia in 1844, and that the heroic lives of the Bahá’í martyrs had established an unshakable basis for every liberal and universal cause, Miss Farmer journeyed to ‘Akká, the prison colony near Mount Carmel, and offered her services to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. This action brought about no fundamental alterations in the policy or purposes of Green Acre, but related Green Acre to the modern world Movement at its spiritual source.

The Tablets addressed by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to Miss Farmer during subsequent years expressed His unfailing guidance in all her great work. In some of them He wrote: