New Harmony

Richard Meier: Atheneum

New Harmony, town, Posey county, southwestern Indiana, U.S. It is located on the Wabash River at the Illinois border, 28 miles (45 km) northwest of Evansville. The site was first occupied by prehistoric mound builders and later was a camping ground for Piankashaw and other Indians. The settlement of Harmonie was founded in 1814–15 by George Rapp, a German Pietist preacher who had first gone to Pennsylvania in 1803 with his followers from Württemberg, Germany. When they later moved west, a prosperous Indiana colony evolved, but unrest brought on by hostile neighbours spurred the Rappite leaders to sell their holdings in 1825 to Robert Owen, who renamed the town New Harmony. Owen was a Welsh reformer who first went to the United States to found a cooperative community based on plans for humanity’s salvation through “rational” thinking, cooperation, and free education. He was aided by William Maclure, a Scottish-born geologist, businessman, and philanthropist who was a proponent of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s pedagogical methods and sought to establish them at the community. Maclure agreed to finance the schools, recruiting several dozen distinguished scholars and educators (the so-called “boatload of knowledge”) and providing scientific equipment and a library.

About 1,000 settlers responded to Owen’s public appeal, but most were misfits who ate his rations, argued over government, and were unable to perform the menial tasks vital to such a community. Farms and workshops lay idle while virtual anarchy reigned. By May 1827 Owen’s cash had been absorbed by payments for land and supplies, and he returned to Britain in 1828. The property was divided among five of Owen’s eight children, who, with some of the scientists and teachers, stayed on to develop one of the most notable pre-Civil War cultural centres in the United States. A laboratory, converted in 1843 from a Rappite granary by David Dale Owen (first U.S. and Indiana state geologist), was headquarters for what later became the U.S. Geological Survey. The 1818 structure was restored in the late 1990s, and another of Owen’s laboratories has also been restored.

New Harmony is now an agricultural-trading centre and tourist destination. The town was made a national historic district in 1965, and many of the Harmonist and Rappite buildings have been restored, including the Robert Henry Fauntleroy House (1822–40), the Rapp-Maclure-Owen House (1844), Barrett Gate House (1815), Dormitory Number 2 (1822), and the Labyrinth (shrubbery; restored 1940) with its baffling pathways. The Roofless Church (1960), designed by architect Philip Johnson, has a Jacques Lipchitz sculpture. The ashes of theologian Paul Tillich are interred in Tillich Park. The Workingmen’s Institute (1894) was one of the country’s first free public libraries. Harmonie State Park is just south of the town. Inc. 1850. Pop. (2000) 916; (2010) 789.