Description
The past has a future here in the Ardens. Arden Craft Shop Museum is home to new local art each month.
Usual Hours:
Sundays, 1:00-3:00 p.m.
Wednesdays, 7:30-9:00 p.m.
Afternoon with the Artist: One Sunday every month, a local artist displays their work at the Craft Shop Museum.
The Ardens are a tight, energetic community with a strong tradition of personal involvement, family participation, artistic endeavor, culinary sharing, open fields, dense woods, boulder-strewn streams, and a century-old history of progressive politics. Active as we are in the present, we are active as well preserving the rich history of the people who went before us.
Arden was founded in 1900 by sculptor Frank Stephens and architect Will Price based on the Single Tax philosophy of Henry George, a political economist whose ideas were popular in America in the late 1800s. The land was and still is owned in common. Residents do not pay taxes on the houses they own but rather on the land they rent. In 1922, Ardentown was founded along similar lines, as was Ardencroft in 1950, when it also encouraged a racially-mixed community. Together, the three municipalities are called “The Ardens” but most residents think of their community as a single entity, “Arden.”
The name “Arden” comes from the wooded retreat described in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” and the community has been a retreat since it was founded. Theatre is and has been a mainstay, as have the arts, crafts, concerts, weekly community dinners, the annual Arden Fair, and a dizzying array of activities residents have pursued ever since families started spending their summers here, the dads coming down by train on weekends.