Just across the Indiana state line, Elkhart County still manufacturers and delivers 80 percent of the country’s RVs. city to decriminalize pot in 1972.ĭetroit, of course, was once a working-class boom town. In 1968, Leinbach’s personal hero, the poet/pot activist/ cause celebre John Sinclair, co-founded the anti-racist White Panther Party in Ann Arbor, which itself would become the first U.S. The Port Huron Statement, a postwar generation’s rather ambitious manifesto for radical participatory democracy, was issued there in 1962. Perhaps it’s Michigan’s strange mix of urban manufacturing, rural agriculture, and university culture. The state’s history is a fascinating nexus of radical ideas, like some concentrated resin of our melting pot. As Leinbach put it, “any time I told Tom, or any time anybody told Tom, ‘you can’t do that,’ well, ‘you watch! Don’t tell me I can’t.’ That was the magic words: you can’t.” Although his efforts were perfectly legal, Crosslin had to be talked down from some of his more antagonistic plans, like putting up a sign in near town featuring a giant pot leaf just to piss off the right people. Built like a bear, Crosslin was the physical and temperamental opposite of his younger, quieter, partner. Beyond that, the network of kin included friends like Leinbach, or Crosslin’s 19-year-old nephew Boss.Ĭrosslin and Rohm made for a perfect odd couple, a complementary pair. At the core was Crosslin, his partner Rollie Rohm, and Rohm’s young son, Robert.

It wasn’t hard - with his white beard and ponytail, Leinbach was one part good-ol-boy, one part hippie a northern Willie Nelson. I tried to imagine what he looked like back then. “There was a real good community on the farm,” Leinbach explained to me as we sat in his garage this past August, about 20 miles from where the farm had burned.

The crew erected a full stage, and a general store with a fully functioning cafe and game room. The event kept getting bigger - something Crosslin was always pushing for, Leinbach said. The next year, the event was large enough that the Michigan Militia was hired to provide security. A $10 entrance fee got you access to, well, not much. On Labor Day of 1995, the farm’s crew held a sort of dry run. We were doing what we had to do with what was at our disposal to do it,” Leinbach said. It took them a few tries to get it right. “Those people loved Rainbow Farm dearly.” Literally, a joint effort,” Leinbach said, emphasizing a pun that’ll never go out of style. Leinbach, along with a group of regulars, helped him turn Rainbow Farm from a haphazard campsite to one of the most well-known marijuana gatherings in the country. Purchased by Crosslin in 1993, he transformed the overgrown acreage. To be fair, Rainbow Farm was more than a party.

Liberal crime squad under siege