We’ve all heard the story that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple in a Los Altos, California, garage (a.k.a. Jobs’s parents’ house). But did you know that a McMinnville hippie commune with an apple orchard also played a part in the origins of the three-trillion-dollar company? More concretely, the two are linked via the company name. Now, that former commune is a veritable agricultural estate, with 388 acres spread across five parcels, two remodeled houses, a barn and various outbuildings—as well as a good backstory—all on the market for $5 million.
It all starts with Jobs’s time at Reed College, where he enrolled as an English major in the fall of 1972. Jobs became the school’s “most famous dropout” after one semester, but stuck around for another 18 months, auditing classes that interested him more than the required courses. (This is when he took the calligraphy class that inspired his love for typeface and font, and informed future Apple designs.)
At Reed, Jobs met Robert Friedland, a charismatic guy and student body president who was buying an electric typewriter from him. Friedland, a future billionaire in the mining industry, taught Jobs about the “reality distortion field,” and introduced the tech geek to the commune on his uncle’s McMinnville property, called the All One Farm.
At the farm, according to listing materials, the countercultural community blended Eastern spirituality, psychedelic exploration, and communal living and labor—thus Jobs spent time picking apples in the orchard on one of his many stints there. He later told biographer Walter Isaacson that the work inspired the naming of Apple: “I was on one of my fruitarian diets. I had just come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer.’ Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book.”…