History & Significance
New Harmony sits on the Wabash River in Posey County in the extreme southwest corner of Indiana, a location that in 1814 was at the edge of the American frontier. The town was founded that year by the Harmony Society, a German Protestant sect led by George Rapp who had emigrated from Württemberg seeking religious freedom and economic self-sufficiency. The Harmonists built a complete and functioning community on the Indiana frontier: a church, a school, dormitories, workshops, a brewery, a granary, and 180 buildings in roughly ten years, organizing their labor on communal principles and achieving a level of agricultural and craft productivity that attracted visitors from across the country.
In 1825, George Rapp sold the entire town, its buildings, and its surrounding land to the Scottish industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen for $150,000. Owen renamed it New Harmony and set out to prove that a cooperative community organized around education, science, and rational principles could replace the competitive economic system he believed was degrading human welfare in industrial Britain and America.
Owen's experiment attracted some of the most distinguished scientists, educators, and social reformers in the United States and Europe. The passengers on a keelboat that arrived in the spring of 1826, known as the Boatload of Knowledge, included the geologist William Maclure, the naturalists Thomas Say and Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, and the educator Marie Duclos Fretageot. The community they established at New Harmony produced the first geological survey of the United States, the first American kindergarten, the first free public school, the first free library, and the first civic society for women in the country.
Owen's social experiment lasted only two years before collapsing under internal disagreements. But the intellectual community he had assembled remained in New Harmony, and the town continued to produce scientific work of national significance for decades. The Posey County deed records trace the remarkable transfer of an entire town from the Harmonist Society to Robert Owen and then through the subsequent dispersal of Owen's land among his children and the community members who stayed.
The Harmonists and what they built
The Harmony Society that George Rapp led to Indiana in 1814 was the second community they had established in America; the first had been at Harmony, Pennsylvania, which they sold before moving west to the frontier. The Harmonists were celibate, communal, and extraordinarily productive. Their theology held that the Second Coming was imminent, that preparation for it required material self-sufficiency and spiritual purity, and that individual property ownership was an obstacle to both.
The community they built on the Wabash River was, by frontier standards, impressive. Their orchards, vineyards, and fields produced surplus crops that they sold to surrounding settlements. Their workshops produced furniture, textiles, and manufactured goods of quality that found markets in Cincinnati and Louisville. Their church, a large frame building, was the largest in Indiana when it was completed. Their accounting records, preserved in the Harmony Society archive, document a community that functioned as a self-contained economic unit with significant surplus.
When Rapp decided to return his community to Pennsylvania, founding Economy near Pittsburgh in 1825, he sold New Harmony as a complete, functioning town. The purchase price of $150,000 reflected not just the land but the buildings, the orchard, the vineyards, the granary, and the entire productive infrastructure the Harmonists had assembled over a decade. The Indiana deed records document one of the largest single real estate transactions in the state's early history.
Robert Owen and the experiment in human nature
Robert Owen arrived at New Harmony in January 1826 with a vision and without a plan for how to implement it. He had made his fortune and his reputation at New Lanark, Scotland, where he had demonstrated that treating workers well and educating their children produced more productive workers and a more stable community. He believed this demonstrated that human character was entirely the product of environment, and that reorganizing the environment could reorganize human behavior.
The Constitution of the New Harmony Community of Equality, which Owen drafted in 1826, called for common property, equal labor obligations, and free access to education, housing, and food for all members. The problems were immediate. The community attracted idealists, intellectuals, and free spirits along with serious workers, and the division of labor that the Constitution required proved impossible to maintain fairly in practice. Owen spent much of his time in England and Washington lobbying for social reform while the community managed itself imperfectly.
The experiment officially ended in 1827, when Owen divided the property among his children and several community leaders. His son Robert Dale Owen, who remained in New Harmony, went on to represent Indiana in Congress, advocate for public education, and draft the legislation establishing the Smithsonian Institution. The practical legacy of Owen's failed social experiment outlasted the experiment itself by generations.
The scientists who stayed and what they found
William Maclure, who funded much of Owen's educational program and brought the scientists and educators who gave New Harmony its intellectual legacy, was a Scottish-American geologist who had already produced the first geological map of the United States when he arrived in Indiana. He used New Harmony as a base for continued geological and natural history work in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys for years after Owen's social experiment had ended.
Thomas Say, who came on the Boatload of Knowledge and remained in New Harmony until his death in 1834, was the foremost American entomologist and conchologist of his era. His American Entomology, produced partly while he was at New Harmony, described hundreds of species previously unknown to science. He named many of the insect species that American naturalists are still working from today, and he collected extensively in the Posey County countryside during his years there.
Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, the French naturalist and artist, produced natural history illustrations at New Harmony of a quality that rivaled the finest work being done in Europe. He documented the fish, reptiles, and invertebrates of the Ohio and Wabash river systems with scientific precision and artistic skill. His drawings, held in archives in Paris and in the Working Men's Institute in New Harmony, are primary scientific documents as well as works of art. The combination of Maclure's geological work, Say's entomology, and Lesueur's natural history illustration made New Harmony, briefly, the center of American natural science.