The Mother Earth News was the handbook for a hip, self-sufficient, alternative-minded generation. At the magazine’s peak, it had more than 1 million subscribers, 600 acres, 150 staffers and two private planes. And—who knew?—the whole operation put down its deepest roots in Hendersonville.

by Jess McCuan . photos by Rimas Zailskas

The magazine was simply called Mother. Letters to the Editor of The Mother Earth News always started off, “Dear Mother,…” You ordered books from Mother’s Bookshelf. Experiments were conducted by Mother’s Gardeners in Mother’s Research Center. “Mother Wants Old Magazines!” said one ad, from 1971. Apparently, she intended to recycle them.

Mother, as the magazine was (and still is) affectionately known, was more like a person than a publication. For years, magazine staffers—more than 100 of them by the late 1970s—didn’t have bylines. They were simply Mother staff. After all, most stories were written by people around the country who had designed or tested out their own plastic mulches, solar stoves and chicken-powered cars themselves. To be sure, the whole operation, which for 15 years operated out of buildings in downtown Hendersonville, was something of a mother ship—a clearinghouse of information and the center of a movement for people who wanted instructions on alternative living.

John and Jane Shuttleworth didn’t know it at first, but they created the mother of all back-to-the-lander magazines. Jane Shuttleworth, who still lives on acreage south of Hendersonville, met John Shuttleworth in Raleigh in 1968. He was a salesman for a company that sold aircraft kits. He’d had all sorts of jobs, from factory work to freelance drawing to ad copywriting on Madison Avenue. She grew up in the North Carolina Piedmont and worked at an employment agency but dreamed of living on a mountain farm. When they married later that year, they didn’t have much of a plan—except, Jane says, they didn’t like offices.

So they skipped town and left their offices behind—for a while. John landed a sales gig in tiny Madison, Ohio, and just after they moved there, the Shuttleworths and their friends starting working round the clock laying out stories on their kitchen table for two magazines: Lifestyle! (“A Magazine of Alternatives”) and The Mother Earth News.

The very first cover of The Mother Earth News is an orange-ish earthscape that looks decidedly like a rock album. Published in January 1970, the headline reads: “…a new beginning.” Inside were instructions for building a teepee and a starting a career drawing cartoons. To understand the magazine’s lightning-fast rise in popularity, it helps to recall that the very first Earth Day took place that year, on April 22, 1970. The Shuttleworths, at first, seemed to be surveying Earth-friendly and DIY trends. John had also grown up on an Indiana farm, and the tone showed a reverence for simple living and hard work.

But Mother’s stories, and the magazine’s voice, quickly gathered a sort of populist momentum. In between bread recipes, the couple dabbled in many aspects of economic and political life, from oil dependency to war to treatment of Native Americans. The main message was something like: Live lightly on the planet. If you’re creative, you’ll do it well—and we can help. “The Shuttleworths’ great genius was catching a sense of a particular moment in time and reflecting the values of that particular time very compellingly in a magazine,” says Bryan Welch, the current publisher and editorial director of Ogden Publications in Topeka, Kansas, which owns The Mother Earth News. “Their ear for the zeitgeist was very accurate.”

The Shuttleworths moved to Hendersonville in 1973. They lived in a house on the edge of town, and a few years later (after a multi-state search) they used money from the magazine to purchase more than 600 acres of picturesque property for a research farm and eco-village. The eco-village, where Jane Shuttleworth still lives, had acres of biodynamic gardens and solar installations and was open to the public for a few years starting around 1980.

At some point after the move, Mother’s editorial staff ballooned. The crowd of writers, photographers and illustrators started to fill up a 50,000-square-foot office building on Stoney Mountain Road, just north of downtown Hendersonville. The numbers swelled particularly when typists, photographers, phone answerers and other willing (sometimes untrained) souls started showing up from around the country. At 26, Richard Freudenberger was an automotive journalist living in New York City. He remembers reading an unusual New York Times job ad one day around 1977. “It said: Come to the beautiful mountains of Western North Carolina. Design your own office. Name your salary,” he says. Freudenberger did (at least the salary part), and he stayed on the Mother staff as associate editor and research coordinator until he and 15 others formed their own magazine, BackHome, in 1990. Mary Jo Padgett, who was hired away from a large Atlanta ad firm, joined Mother as an associate editor in 1980. She distinctly remembers long hours and a lot of rewriting—mainly because submissions came from non-writers. “We would edit the hell out of it and put their name on it,” she says of Mother’s stories about root beer and composting toilets. “This was a magazine by the people and for the people.”

The magazine certainly had an alternative feel. But by the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, it was simply one of the most popular—and profitable—magazines in the country. Padgett remembers that, on her way out the door of the fancy Atlanta firm, nearly all of her colleagues confessed that they were Mother subscribers and kept every issue. Jane Shuttleworth notes that, by 1979, the number of Mother subscribers was nearing 1 million—which meant the total readership was likely a multiple of that, around 3 to 4 million. Mainstream advertisers like Volkswagen and Datsun wouldn’t stop calling, and Mother’s issues from 1979 and ’80 were thick with ads for everything from tractors and wood chippers to do-it-yourself dome kits. Ironically, the back-to-the-lander magazine was doing so well it could afford to send its editors around the country in two private jets. “It always bothers me that people thought this was part of the hippie movement,” Shuttleworth says. “It really wasn’t. Our readers read TIME and Newsweek… There are all types of individuals who see the value of self sufficiency—no matter how much money they have.”

The magazine wasn’t the only product the Mother staff cranked out. Don Osby, now the BackHome art director, joined Mother in 1979. A Midwesterner with a master’s degree in geophysics, Osby’s first task was to draw up plans for an electric car. Most of Mother’s auto projects happened in a large tin-roofed building in downtown Hendersonville (now the Next to New antiques shop). In 1980 or so, Osby’s team built an early high-mileage hybrid there by attaching an electric aircraft motor and a small diesel engine to the body of an old Subaru. “It was loud,” Osby says, of the vehicle, which got 85 miles to the gallon. “It was definitely no Prius.” But the composite car was remarkable nonetheless, and one of a hundred similar projects that Mother staffers cooked up in company research facilities.

By the early 1980s, things started to slide—on just about every level. For one, the Shuttleworths’ marriage was in trouble. John was, by all accounts, charismatic but temperamental. Freudenberger remembers he had a terrific radio voice, and Mother did radio spots for years. Other co-workers remember John as a voracious, self-taught intellect and a workaholic. Osby says John could be demanding and difficult in the office, and there were horror stories of him hiring people who moved cross-country with their families—only to be fired after a few days on the job. “He pulled a lot of people into the area and then cut them loose,” Osby says. Lorna Loveless, who joined Mother as a proofreader in 1983 and is now BackHome’s editor, noted that Shuttleworth could be very quirky about language. He liked folksy terms like “critters,” she says, but he didn’t like repeating any word—even nouns like “tomato.” You had to come up with alternatives for tomato, like “globular fruit.” “John was quite controlling,” she says. “He stayed on top of his editors.”

At some point, Jane (whom John referred to in print, somewhat condescendingly, as “Little Jane”) recalls that John was working 16-hour days. Even back in 1975, in an interview that ran in Mother, he described magazine work as punishing: “Too damn many people think that publishing a magazine is a lot of fun, that’s why. And it’s not. Not if you put out a good one,” Shuttleworth told the “interviewer” (likely himself). “It’s brutal, grinding, hard, damn work. There’s a reason for calling a deadline a deadline. Every one dang near kills you!”

In the end, it’s unclear exactly what killed John Shuttleworth. He passed away while sitting in his hot tub in Colorado in 2009. He and Jane had divorced in 1982, and John remarried. Jane did not. At the end of their time running the magazine, Jane says, she and John grew alienated from one other. They were simply worn out. “He was a workaholic, I wasn’t,” she says. “What was frustrating to me was that we did all these articles on neat things, but I never had time to actually do them.” When she pulled away from the magazine, she pulled away hard. Neither Shuttleworth ever took on a magazine project again, and Jane, instead, opened a small ballroom dance studio on Main Street in downtown Hendersonville.

Around the time of their divorce, the couple sold the magazine to three employees: an editor, Bruce Woods, and two men on the business side, David Adams and Robert Lieb. The three new leaders bought the business with well over 100 employees and three separate branches to run (magazine, educational seminars, research farm). Not only did the larger cultural current change fast—it was, after all, the materialistic ‘80s—but also the managing of Mother’s affairs was quite complicated. After a few years of a Ronald Reagan presidency, “deregulation” and “free markets” were buzzwords. The stock market was hot, alternatives were not. “Living lightly on the planet—it was just no longer en vogue,” says Freudenberger, who noted that his former New York colleagues were making huge cash. “It was no longer about the good of the people, it was for the good of you.”

The mid-‘80s spelled the end of The Mother Earth News in Hendersonville. After two particularly grim Black Fridays, as Mary Jo Padgett describes them, nearly half of the Mother staff was gone. When magazine staffers dwindled to just a few dozen and the research farm closed its doors to visitors, subscribers started falling off significantly. Jane Shuttleworth says that, around that time, she noticed a significant shift in the magazine, too. “The editors would rather write the articles themselves,” she says. “That cost them credibility. People could just go and look up the topics in a library.”

By 1985, the three employee owners wanted out. They sold most of the operation (the 600-acre research farm by that time belonged to Jane) to a New York City publisher, the New American Magazine Company. For a few years, it continued to employ Hendersonville editorial employees remotely. But when New American’s managers strongly encouraged the Hendersonville crew to move to New York, every single employee rather mutinously refused. In 1990, Freudenberger and a dozen Mother editors and writers formed BackHome, which is currently headquartered in a historic building in Flat Rock.

What’s extraordinary about the Mother Earth legacy is not only its breadth of coverage, but also the fact that its main topics—alternative energy, sustainability and simple living—still fill the pages of hundreds of modern magazines. “We’re hearing it all again,” says Freudenberger, the BackHome publisher, who raises chickens and bees in his backyard.

Jane Shuttleworth says she can’t believe how frequently the themes of Mother’s old rants and stories come up in protests and movements today. Take Occupy Wall Street and related groups, she says. “I’m wondering why it’s taken them so long to figure out they were being manipulated by this system,” she says. She believes so many people now seem lulled by the Internet and bad TV. “People are so distracted by celebrity news that they’re easily exploited, manipulated and led along. They live in cyberspace and don’t pay attention to the real world.”

In his 1975 interview with himself, John Shuttleworth made a speech that could have been a precursor to her sentiment: “We’ve always worked hard at finding ways to reach what I call ‘The Great Sleeping Middle Class,’” he said. “These are the people who are still being manipulated into being a market for all the plastic and the electric toothbrushes and the snowmobiles and the chemicals in the food and all the other schlock that’s killing the planet and them. Take just one of those people out of the big car and off the freeways. Show him how to quit the corporate job he hates and set up a little business of his own down in the basement. Let him discover that he can grow his own vegetables, fruit, sprouts, eggs, milk, and meat in the backyard… Now what have you done? [1] You’ve given that guy’s life back to him and [2] you’ve lessened the impact on the planet as much as if you had cut the population of India by 50. You have, in short, accomplished exactly what Mother Earth News was created to do.”