New Harmony is a historic town on the Wabash River in Harmony Township, Posey County, Indiana, United States. It lies north of Mount Vernon, the county seat, and is part of the Evansville metropolitan area. The town's population was 690 at the 2020 census.
Established by the Harmony Society in 1814 under the leadership of George Rapp, the town was originally named Harmony (also called Harmonie, or New Harmony). In its early years the settlement was the home of Lutherans who had separated from their church in the Duchy of Württemberg and immigrated to the United States. The Harmonists built a town in the wilderness, but in 1824 they decided to sell their property and return to Pennsylvania.Karl J. R. Arndt, A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, 1814–1824 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1975) 1:xi. Robert Owen, a Welsh industrialist and social reformer, purchased the town in 1825 in order to create a utopian community, but it lasted only a few years.Ray E. Boomhower, "New Harmony: Home to Indiana's Communal Societies," Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History 14(4):36–37."New Harmony", The Encyclopedia of Social Reform, p. 825
Town residents established the state's first public library, a civic drama club, and a public school system open to men and women. Its prominent citizens included Owen's sons: Robert Dale Owen, an Indiana congressman and social reformer who sponsored legislation to create the Smithsonian Institution; David Dale Owen, a state and federal geologist; William Owen, a New Harmony businessman; and Richard Owen, Indiana state geologist, Indiana University professor, and first president of Purdue University. The town also served as the second headquarters of the U.S. Geological Survey. Numerous scientists and educators contributed to New Harmony's intellectual community, including William Maclure, Marie Louise Duclos Fretageot, Thomas Say, Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, Joseph Neef, Frances Wright, and others.
Many of the town's old Harmonist buildings have been restored. These structures, along with others related to the Owenite community, are included in the New Harmony Historic District. Contemporary additions to the town include the Roofless Church and Atheneum. The New Harmony State Memorial is located south of town on State Road 69 in Harmonie State Park.
History
Harmonist settlement (1814–1824)
The town of Harmony was founded by Harmony Burton in 1814 under the leadership of German immigrant George Rapp (born Johann Georg Rapp). It was the second of three towns built by the pietist, communal religious group, known as Harmonists, Harmonites, or Rappites. The Harmonists settled in the Indiana Territory after leaving Harmony, Pennsylvania, where westward expansion, the area's rising population, jealous neighbors, and the increasing cost of land threatened the Society's desire for isolation.Karl J. R Arndt, George Rapp's Harmony Society, 1785–1847 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965) p. 130–31, 133.
In April 1814 Anna Mayrisch, John L. Baker, and Ludwick Shirver (Ludwig Schreiber) traveled west in search of a new location for their congregation, one that would have fertile soil and access to a navigable waterway.Arndt, George Rapp's Harmony Society, p. 133. By May 10 the men had found suitable land along the Wabash River in the Indiana Territory and made an initial purchase of approximately . Rapp wrote on May10, "The place is 25 miles from the Ohio mouth of the Wabash, and 12 miles from where the Ohio makes its curve first before the mouth. The town will be located about 1/4 mile from the river above on the channel on a plane as level as the floor of a room, perhaps a good quarter mile from the hill which lies suitable for a vineyard."Arndt, A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, 1:8. Although Rapp expressed concern that the town's location lacked a waterworks, the area provided an opportunity for expansion and access to markets through the nearby rivers, causing him to remark, "In short, the place has all the advantages which one could wish, if a steam engine meanwhile supplies what is lacking."
The first Harmonists left Pennsylvania in June 1814 and traveled by flatboat to their new land in the Indiana Territory. In May 1815 the last of the Harmonists who had remained behind until the sale of their town in Pennsylvania was completed departed for their new town along the Wabash River.Arndt, George Rapp's Harmony Society, p. 162. Frederick Reichert Rapp, George Rapp's adopted son, drew up the town plan for their new village at Harmony, Indiana, which surveyors laid out on August8, 1814.Arndt, George Rapp's Harmony Society 1785–1847, p. 146. By 1816, the same year that Indiana became a state, the Harmonists had acquired of land, built 160 homes and other buildings, and cleared for their new town.Arndt, George Rapp's Harmony Society, p. 182. The settlement also began to attract new arrivals, including emigrants from Germany such as members of Rapp's congregation from Württemberg, many of whom expected the Harmonists to pay for their passage to America.Arndt, George Rapp's Harmony Society, p. 182–98. However, the new arrivals "were more of a liability than an asset".Arndt, George Rapp's Harmony Society, p. 209. On March 20, 1819, Rapp commented, "It is astonishing how much trouble the people who have arrived here have made, for they have no morals and do not know what it means to live a moral and well-mannered life, not to speak of true Christianity, of denying the world or yourself."Arndt, A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, 1:674.
Visitors to Harmony commented on the commercial and industrial work being done in this religious settlement along the Wabash River. "It seemed as though I found myself in the midst of Germany," noted one visitor.Arndt, A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, 1:744. In 1819 the town had a steam-operated wool carding and spinning factory, a horse-drawn and human-powered threshing machine, a brewery, distillery, vineyards, and a winery. The property included an orderly town, "laid out in a square", with a church, school, store, dwellings for residents, and streets to create "the most beautiful city of western America, because everything is built in the most perfect symmetry". Other visitors were not as impressed: "hard labor & coarse fare appears to be the lot of all except the family of Rapp, he lives in a large & handsome brick house while the rest inhabit small log cabins. How so numerous a population are kept quietly & tamely in absolute servitude it is hard to conceive—the women I believe do more labor in the field than the men, as large numbers of the latter are engaged in different branches of manufactures."Arndt, A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, 1:784. Although they were not paid for their work, the 1820 manufacturer's census reported that 75 men, 12 women, and 30 children were employed, in the Society's tanneries, saw and grain mills, and woolen and cotton mills. Manufactured goods included cotton, flannel, and wool cloth, yarn, knit goods, tin ware, rope, beer, peach brandy, whiskey, wine, wagons, carts, plows, flour, beef, pork, butter, leather, and leather goods.Arndt, A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, 2:131–32.
The Harmonist community continued to thrive during the 1820s, but correspondence from March 6, 1824, between Rapp and his adopted son, Frederick, indicates that the Harmonists planned to sell their Indiana property and were already looking for a new location.Arndt, George Rapp's Harmony Society, p. 287. In May, a decade after their arrival in Indiana, the Harmonists purchased land along the Ohio River eighteen miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and were making arrangements to advertise the sale of their property in Indiana.Arndt, A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, 1:837, 871–74. The move, although it was made primarily for religious reasons, would provide the Harmonists with easier access to eastern markets and a place where they could live more peacefully with others who shared their German language and culture. On May 24, 1824, a group of Harmonists boarded a steamboat and departed Indiana, bound for Pennsylvania, where they founded the community of Economy, the present-day town of Ambridge. In May 1825 the last Harmonists left Indiana after the sale of their of property, which included the land and buildings, to Robert Owen for $150,000.Arndt, A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, 1:837, 871.Boomhower, p. 37.See Donald F. Carmony and Josephine M. Elliott. "New Harmony, Indiana: Robert Owen's Seedbed for Utopia," Indiana Magazine of History 76, no. 3 (September 1980):165. Carmony and Elliott indicate that Owen paid $125,000 for New Harmony, and cite other sources that state varying amounts. Owen hoped to establish a new community on the Indiana frontier, one that would serve as a model community for communal living and social reform.
Owen community (1825–1827)
Robert Owen was a social reformer and wealthy industrialist who made his fortune from textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland. Owen, his twenty-two-year-old son, William, and his Scottish friend Donald McDonald sailed to the United States in 1824 to purchase a site to implement Owen's vision for "a New Moral World" of happiness, enlightenment, and prosperity through education, science, technology, and communal living. Owen believed his utopian community would create a "superior social, intellectual and physical environment" based on his ideals of social reform.Donald E. Pitzer, "The Original Boatload of Knowledge Down the Ohio River." Reprint. Ohio Journal of Science 89, no. 5 (December 1989):128–142. Owen was motivated to buy the town in order to prove his theories were viable and to correct the troubles that were affecting his mill-town community New Lanark. The ready-built town of Harmony, Indiana, fitted Owen's needs. In January 1825 he signed the agreement to purchase the town and renamed it the New Harmony Community of Equality.
Owen invited "any and all" to join the settlement.William E. Wilson, The Angel and the Serpent: The Story of New Harmony (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967, 2nd ed.), p. 105, 110, 116. While many of the town's new arrivals had a sincere interest in making it a success, the experiment also attracted "crackpots, free-loaders, and adventurers whose presence in the town made success unlikely."Wilson, p. 116. William Owen, who remained in New Harmony while his father returned east to recruit new residents, also expressed concern in his diary entry, dated March24, 1825: "I doubt whether those who have been comfortable and content in their old mode of life, will find an increase of enjoyment when they come here. How long it will require to accustom themselves to their new mode of living, I am unable to determine."Joel Hiatt, ed., "Diary of William Owen: From November 10, 1824, to April 20, 1825" Indiana Historical Society Publications 4, no. 1 (1906): 130.