Barbara Nolfi 'Had This View of How Things Ought to Be

Barbara Nolfi as a child Credit: Courtesy

This “Life Stories” profile is part of a collection of articles remembering Vermonters who died in 2024.

In 1969, Barbara Nolfi drove from California to Vermont to start a commune. She was 27. She came with her husband, their young son and a dog named Sam.

Two California friends who wanted in on the commune followed them a few weeks later. The four picked Vermont because Barbara’s husband, Jim, got a job teaching at the University of Vermont. Two more couples soon signed on and the group, financed by a pair of Jungian psychologists in California, bought a farm in Franklin. In February 1970 they moved in and embarked on their political and social revolutions.

They ripped out the phone and the washing machine — despite having three kids in cloth diapers. They rejected their benefactors’ offer of snowmobiles because the machines polluted their ideal: living off the land collectively and simply. They would grow their food, farm partly with horses, and turn off their electricity periodically to use kerosene lamps and a woodstove. If they needed to get around in the wintertime, they’d use snowshoes and skis.

They shed societal norms, and sometimes their clothes, as they pursued a new way of living. They planned to smash monogamy, wipe out the nuclear family with its patriarchal hierarchy and live as one big family.

It wasn’t Barbara’s idea. “I wasn’t so much into the social experiment,” she told an interviewer in 2015, “but I definitely was into the politics.” A child of Eisenhower Republicans, she was “relatively conservative” in the late ’60s, she told the Vermont Historical Society for an oral history project. News coverage of monks setting themselves on fire in the streets of Saigon turned her into a war protester. Starting a commune, however, appealed more to Jim and their friends, she said: “I was just coming along.”

But Barbara, who rode into Vermont on somebody else’s dream, spent the rest of her life here building a better reality. Grounded by a deep sense of self and driven to work for the common good — especially the good of women and poor people — Barbara helped start or shape organizations that grew into local institutions.

Believing health care was a right, she cofounded the People’s Free Clinic in Burlington’s Old North End. It’s now Community Health Centers, with nine locations. Empowering women who didn’t want to give birth sedated and in stirrups, she became a midwife and ushered 100 babies into the world in their own homes. She cofounded the Charlotte Family Health Center and became a physician’s assistant, then a registered nurse.

A proponent of collective action, she participated in one of the food-buying clubs that dotted Chittenden County and grew into Burlington’s City Market, Onion River Co-op. Barbara served on its board.

Eventually, she entered city government. She served on Burlington’s Youth Employment Program’s board of directors, on the city’s water resources commission, its parks and recreation commission, and, for eight years, its city council, then called the board of aldermen. She helped change that, too.

There’s just so many things in Burlington that Barbara had her fingers on.Brian Pine

“There’s just so many things in Burlington that Barbara had her fingers on,” said Brian Pine, a fellow Ward 3 Progressive councilor who served with her for four years. “But you wouldn’t have known it because Barbara Nolfi never stood up at the podium and took credit or got pats on the back.”

Finally, coming full circle in a way, Barbara helped start another, albeit less radical, intentional living community. In 2007, after working 18 years to create it, she and her longtime partner, Don Schramm, moved into Burlington Cohousing East Village. They later lobbied its board to allow green burials: interments that forego embalming and vaults to allow natural decomposition. Barbara’s became the first. She died of a stroke on September 29 at age 82.

Dozens of people, including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), gathered at Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center’s Film House earlier this month to grieve their loss and celebrate Barbara’s life. “She had this view of how things ought to be, and she would move to learn new things so she could help make that happen,” said Helen Keith, a speaker at the event who once shared a house with Barbara.

Those who knew her use many of the same words to describe her: smart, level-headed, practical, competent. Other women emulated her. She was the take-charge big sister.

Barbara and her son, Dylan Credit: Courtesy

Hippies had a DIY attitude, and Barbara personified it, said her son, Dylan Nolfi, a child of the commune. When it was time for him to attend school, Barbara and other parents started one in the basement of a Cambridge church. Barbara taught tai chi there. When Birth Book author Raven Lang came to the free clinic to teach midwifery Barbara thought, My gosh. That’s great. I could do that.

When she saw something that needed to be created or fixed, she approached it with similar zeal. She was straightforward. She could be blunt. Sitting in audiences where everyone struggled to hear the speaker, Barbara was the one who piped up: “Use the mic!” Not everyone liked her, and she was OK with that. Longtime friend Dan Albert called her “an acquired taste.”

“Honesty was really important to her,” said Don, her partner for the past 42 years. He, too, bore its brunt. “Don, you talk too much,” she told him often. But that’s true, he said, and Barbara’s critiques didn’t trigger him: “I just loved the daylights out of her.”

Barbara Nolfi (far right) with her family Credit: Courtesy

The second of four children, Barbara Catherine Smith was born in 1942 in Texas to two chemistry PhDs who taught at Texas A&M University. The family moved to Oklahoma when she was 3 and to California when she was 13. An avid reader, she was assigned to advanced classes.

She studied English for two years at Pomona College, then transferred to University of California, Berkeley, switched her major to psychology and graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1964.

At a wedding her senior year, she met Jim Nolfi, a Stanford University grad working on a PhD in zoology at Berkeley. They married, had a son, and named him for Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan. He was born in a hospital. “I had my baby at 12:30 at night and didn’t get to see him until, like, seven in the morning,” Barbara told the historical society. “So sad.”

Dylan was almost 2 years old when his parents cofounded the Franklin commune, Earthworks, and he, like the other children there, symbolically came to belong to all the adults. Grown-ups took turns caring for the kids, an arrangement Barbara found empowering because it freed her up to learn new skills. She worked with horses, helped repair a manure spreader and pounded nails into the rafters of the shop the group was building. A thin woman who wore dungarees and brown braids, Barbara felt herself getting physically stronger.

For the two and a half years she lived at the commune (it dissolved a couple of years after she left), she played a pivotal role. “Barbara was ‘the one,'” said Louise Andrews, one of the eight cofounders. “Barbara was the one that found the farm.” She was the one who planned the garden and coordinated canning. When the commune ballooned in the summer with runaways, draft dodgers and other itinerants, Barbara ordered the chaos and divvied up the chores.

Amid the sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Barbara remained pragmatic. “She didn’t smoke dope, for example,” Earthworks cofounder Bruce Taub said. (She didn’t like marijuana, she told the historical society — “I did like psychedelics.”)

A 1971 summer weekend proved to be a seminal catalyst for Barbara and others. Earthworks members invited residents of other communes to Franklin for a “gathering of the tribes.” As many as 200 people “turned on by their lives,” as Barbara put it, discussed the changes they wanted to make in society.

Three main ideas emerged: affordable health care; banding together to buy food; and using newspapers to spread their messages.

Barbara pursued health care. She and about a dozen other volunteers launched the People’s Free Clinic. They recruited doctors to train them as paramedics and to donate a day every week or two to provide care. They set up exam rooms and a lab and began diagnosing and treating colds, coughs and sexually transmitted infections.

Barbara became one of two lead midwives in the clinic’s “birth group.” She exuded competence and support while attending births, but not necessarily warmth, assistant midwife Phyllis Stambolian said: The assistants tended to emotions; Barbara tended to business. And when you were out in Bristol or Charlotte during an ice storm and labor took a bad turn, that’s what you wanted. “She would be the person who would keep her cool,” Stambolian said.

As a parent herself, Barbara instilled in her son an understanding that he mattered to her more than all others. She and Jim split up when Dylan was 2, and Jim died when Dylan was 13.

Barbara read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Treasure Island to Dylan when he was 7 years old and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy when he was 10. She took him to all the Akira Kurosawa movies.

She indulged his obsession with fishing and let him take risks. “I had a butane torch — like a plumbing torch — in my bedroom when I was, like, 13,” he said. “I was into blowing things up.”

Dylan was 14 in 1982 when Barbara and Don met through Single Vermonters, a newspaper where each had placed an ad. Don noticed Barbara’s: “37, divorced, 5’6″, 125 lbs, beautiful, unique, intelligent woman, dark-haired with blue eyes, shy. Seeks companionship for fun, humor, love.” She listed her interests, mentioned her work in health care and said she preferred a man who likes kids.

He showed the personal ads to his friends. “I even sat down with my mom, and we went through the list, and we all ranked them,” Don said. “Barbara always came out on top.”

For their first date, he took Barbara and Dylan to dinner at Tortilla Flat. (He learned that Barbara was actually 40, not 37, perhaps the only thing she ever lied about.) Barbara and Don shared a love of nature and movies and probably 100 friends. They discovered that they had even attended some of the same parties and meetings. “Holy Toledo,” he said. “It was a perfect match.” To this day, he can’t believe that Barbara, “this gem,” had stayed single for 12 years.

She was halfway through nursing school when they met. After graduation, she worked on the pediatrics ward in what is now the University of Vermont Medical Center.

In 1988, campaigning on tenants’ rights, property tax relief, affordable childcare, and improvements to streets and sidewalks, Barbara won a seat on Burlington’s board of aldermen. When she considered policies, councilor Pine said, she thought of the people who would feel their impact — the people not likely to be in the forefront of other policy makers’ minds: women, children, people of color and those with disabilities. Cut lifeguards from city beaches to save money? No, Barbara argued; single moms depend on summer camps that use those beaches.

She played prominent roles in developing Burlington’s publicly owned Waterfront Park and in the voters’ rejection of a long-term contract extension to buy electricity from Hydro-Québec, whose practice of flooding land displaced Indigenous people and harmed wildlife.

Illness gradually impeded Barbara’s ability to multitask and, eventually, her mobility. She started showing signs of Parkinson’s disease around 2011, though it wasn’t diagnosed until 2023. She also had multiple myeloma, which responded well to treatment, Don said. Her health declined rapidly in her last months, but she remained curious and continued to read. She and Don did their customary crossword puzzle together the day before she died.

The day after, Don, Dylan, friends and relatives dug Barbara’s grave. “Also DIY,” Dylan noted. Barbara and Don had picked the spot, right behind the barn, next to her beehives and overlooking a pond and gardens. Don will be buried next to her. He’d like to see a small marker noting the coordinates, their names, and their birth and death dates, he said, but otherwise, cohousing residents can do what they want with the area. “The community can have a garden on top of this. They can plant a tree. They could put a chicken coop here, whatever,” he said.

In a short October ceremony, about 50 people gathered near Barbara’s grave. Dylan, his wife and longtime friends carried her body on a pine board, down a stone path to the barn. Don spoke. Dylan read some of Barbara’s writing. They focused on Barbara’s love of nature.

Then the pallbearers lowered her body into the clay soil, where her four grandchildren had dropped flowers, and Barbara Nolfi went back to the land.

The original print version of this article was headlined “‘She Had This View of How Things Ought to Be’ | Barbara Catherine Nolfi, July 28, 1942-September 29, 2024”