Bayard Lane, named after Blandina Bayard, an early Ramapo settler, was the first of the back-to-the-land homestead communities formed by economist Ralph Borsodi, who established The Independence Foundation to promote and finance their development. A cooperative enterprise of forty acres, it comprised seventeen homesteads on plots of one to three acres for families seeking greater economic independence. It was also the site of the School of Living, founded to teach principles of agrarian self-sufficiency.