Twin Oaks, an experimental community near Char- lottesville, Va., inspired by the behaviorist ideas of B.F. Skinner, still survives after nearly 40 years. Katherine Kinkade, one of its founders, died there July 3 at the age of 77.

The cause was breast cancer, said her daughter, Josie Kinkade.

Inspired by the ideal society described in Skinner’s book “Walden Two,” Kinkade, who was known as Kat, joined with seven other fellow believers in 1967 and took over a former tobacco farm to realize her vision of a perfect egalitarian society.

It was not easy. The farm’s well ran dry, cows starved over the winter and rammed-earth bricks did not generate the kind of revenue that the founders had hoped for. Pot-smoking hippies who drifted into the commune found themselves at odds with work-ethic missionaries like Kinkade, whose blunt practicality and executive talent — rare qualities in the counterculture — helped the stumbling colony achieve something resembling prosperity.

“She was the Hillary Clinton of Twin Oaks,” her daughter said.

Kinkade grew up on the lower rungs of the working class in Seattle. Her father died when she was young. After her stepfather was jailed for sexually abusing her and her sister, she lived with an aunt.

After a year at the University of Washington, she married Donald Logsdon, an Army sergeant, but the two quickly divorced. With a daughter in tow, Kinkade, headed off to Mexico City, where she learned Spanish and found a job teaching English to first- graders at a private school.

In 1964, while living in Los Angeles and working in a dead-end secretarial job, she read “Walden Two.” Skinner’s novel, about humans living in a hivelike egalitarian society, strikes many readers as bloodless and forbidding, but Kinkade responded ecstatically.

Kinkade found a house in Washington, D.C., whose residents were trying to put “Walden Two” into practice and had been living there for two years when a wealthy Skinner devotee lent the residents money to buy a 123-acre tobacco farm.

“They really thought that the rest of the world would see their community and follow its example,” Josie Kin-kade said.

The fires of idealism faded with the years. In 1980, Kinkade moved to Boston and worked, briefly and unhappily, as a computer programmer before returning to Twin Oaks.

“She came back from Boston not just frustrated but beaten down,” her daughter said. Her mood turned self-critical. “What did I build?” she said to her daughter. “A nice place for middle-class hippies to have a great time for a while.” To a newspaper reporter she said, “I’m trapped.”

In 2000, her daughter, who had left Twin Oaks and gone to medical school, bought her a house in Mineral; there, she rescued stray cats and talked to her flowers.

When Kinkade became too ill to carry on, the members of Twin Oaks welcomed her back to care for her as she died. “These people really seem to love me,” she told her daughter before her death. “I don’t know why.”