Maclure’s scientific reputation helped lure internationally known scholars and educators to the new colony, including American naturalist Thomas Say French naturalist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur educators Joseph Neef, Phiquepal d’Arusmont, and Madame Marie Duclos Fretageot Dutch geologist Gerard Troost and Frances Wright, a Scots-born early feminist. His partner in these efforts was William Maclure, who was both a wealthy businessman and a well-known geologist. New Harmony would be an ideal place to put these philosophical ideas to the test.
He also had strong views on education, believing that children should be taken from their parents at the age of two and put into school. He believed that the three greatest evils in society were the institution of marriage, private property and the established church of his day. While the first group was Christian in its basic theology, Owen’s community was founded upon an equally passionate commitment to social equality, progressive education and scientific research. In 1824, a wealthy, Welsh-born industrialist named Robert Owen bought the settlement to establish his own utopian society, which he called New Harmony. The next strange chapter in New Harmony history brings to mind the old adage attributed to Frederick of Prussia: “If I wished to punish a province,” he said, “I would have it governed by philosophers.” They believed that the Second Coming of Christ was due any day and required members to abstain from sex and give up tobacco (no record of which was harder).īut the isolation of the area eventually weighed on them, and after ten years the entire town was put up for sale as the group made plans to return to Pennsylvania. While they were practical in their work habits, their theology was mighty peculiar. The historic district of New Harmony has beautiful gardens (Bob Sessions photo).
Soon the self-sufficient community was producing highly prized textiles and other goods that were sold as far away as Europe. With German industriousness they went to work, draining the wetlands and building nearly 200 log and brick structures. After a decade in the East they wanted an even more remote location for their community and bought 20,000 acres of swampy land on what was then the sparsely populated frontier of the Indiana Territory.
The town was founded in 1814 by the Harmonie Society, a group of Pietists who had fled religious persecution in their native Germany to settle in Pennsylvania. Both have long disbanded, but something of their spirit remains in the appropriately named New Harmony. So it was in New Harmony, Indiana, a charming little town on the bank of the Wabash River that has the unusual distinction of having been home to two of these pie-in-the-sky, utopian communities. Their efforts almost always end in disarray and conflict, but often very interesting things happen along the way. From the Pilgrims to the Hippies, American history has periodically produced groups that try to create these utopian communities. The urge to retreat from the larger world and build an ideal society in the wilderness is a perennial human impulse. New Harmony In Indiana was founded as a utopian society in 1814 and was home to a second utopian community in the 1820s.
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