![]() Stopping in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. As was the case with Rapp, the community represented a new opportunity to achieve the perfect society for Owen, this time founded on scientific, educational, and philosophical pursuit, a direct departure from the religious aspirations of the Harmonists. Owen had taken particular interest in bettering the lives of working men, women, and children in an era of questionable working conditions and limited opportunities, and in providing educational opportunities and limiting child labor. Advertising the entire community of New Harmony for sale, inclusive of all land, buildings, and other improvements, Rapp found a buyer in Robert Owen, a successful manufacturer and owner of the New Lanark mills in Scotland. Plagued with such problems, the Harmonie Society ceased to function in Indiana after 1824, when Rapp decided to return to Pennsylvania, where he established the community of Economy. Under the Harmonie Society’s Articles of Agreement-the document outlining the spirit of the community and the ethos by which members of the community agreed to carry out their lives-all real property was collectively owned by the Society, which provided housing for community members.īy 1824, the Harmonie Society faced numerous problems, including internal dissent, unfavorable conditions, and diminished business income resulting from the community’s distance from the eastern markets where the Harmonists sold their goods. More than 180 structures were completed within ten years of the community’s founding, including dozens of dwellings, dormitories, stores, workshops, and mills, as well as a church, brewery, distillery, tannery, textile factory, and multiple other manufactories. By the time the last transport arrived in New Harmony, the community totaled 730 people. A first generation of log dwelling houses was replaced with two-story brick and frame dwellings, and a tavern, granary, mills, and churches were also constructed. The community was laid out, and swamps drained. ![]() The vacant Indiana wilderness was quickly transformed with Rapp’s religious motives at the core. By 1817, the community of New Harmony encompassed 30,000 acres. The seed for this community was planted in southwestern Indiana on the banks of the Wabash River, with 7,000 acres purchased for the second “Harmonie” or “New Harmonie” in May 1814. Lasting just under a decade, the Harmonie Society was abandoned in 1814, in favor of a location with a more moderate climate and friendlier neighbors, which would be more conducive to the development of an expansive community. The Harmonie Society was established in Butler County, Pennsylvania, in 1804, with nearly 500 members. Under watch of the German government and facing increased persecution, Rapp left for America in July 1803, arriving in Philadelphia three months later. By the end of the eighteenth century, Rapp had upwards of 20,000 followers. A religious expatriate, Rapp, part of volatile religious developments of the period, became the leader of a sectarian, Pietist group in the 1790s that identified faith outside of the established church. New Harmony holds a unique place in America as having been at the center of two distinct nineteenth-century utopian experiments: the religious Harmonie Society, a millennialist sect established by German-born George Rapp, and the secular utopian experiment of Welshman Robert Owen.
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