New Harmony: Two Utopias on the Wabash

This quiet town on the Wabash River was the stage for two of America's boldest experiments in living differently. In eighteen fourteen, a German religious leader named George Rapp brought his followers here and built a town they called Harmonie. The Harmonists were celibate, communal, and famously industrious, raising well over one hundred log, frame, and brick buildings.

Then, in eighteen twenty-five, Rapp sold the whole place to a Scottish industrialist named Robert Owen. Owen dreamed of a secular utopia built on education, science, and shared property, and roughly eight hundred reformers flocked here to try it. The community unraveled within two years, undone by money troubles and squabbling.

But the ideas planted here rippled outward into American science, public education, and the early women's rights movement.