This collection, created by scholar Francelia Butler, documents the Ruskin Co-operative Association, which was active from 1893 to 1899 in Ruskin, Tennessee and from 1899 to 1901 in Ruskin, Georgia. Among these materials are published records, documents, photographs, newspapers (which discuss the economic depression of the 1890s that induced people to join the Commune), and published articles.

This collection of papers focuses on Bakker and Butler's road to publishing At Ruskin, Tennessee: An Introduction to Another Socialist Commune in America with the Edwin Mellen Press. It includes correspondence, editors remarks, notes, and manuscripts.

This collection, the Jan Bakker/Ruskin Commune Papers, 1992-1993, contains the 1992 copy of the manuscript Marxism, Feminism, and Free Love, The Story of the Ruskin Commune by Jan Bakker and Francelia Butler, along with correspondence from Jan Bakker, Professor of English at Utah State University, and W. Todd Groce of the East Tennessee Historical Society.

This collection houses membership lists, mementos, photographs, correspondence, legal papers, scrapbooks, minute books, notes, manuscripts, articles, clippings, and other materials documenting the Ruskin Cooperative Association. Many of these documents were created or collected by Grace (Stone) Buehler during the course of her research into the organization.

This collection contains a poem titled "Tennessee" by William J. Morgan recounting his time living in the Ruskin Colony in Tennessee.