Zoar: The German Utopia That Built Ohio's Canal

The small village of Zoar, just off I-Seventy-Seven in Tuscarawas County, is one of the longest-lived communal experiments in American history. It was built by people who left everything to escape religious persecution, and it lasted eighty-one years.

In eighteen seventeen, roughly two hundred German Separatists arrived in Ohio under the leadership of Joseph Bimeler. They had fled Württemberg, where their refusal to participate in state church rituals had made them targets of legal persecution. They named their settlement Zoar, a Hebrew word for refuge, from the biblical city where Lot fled the destruction of Sodom.

The first years were desperate. Food was short, land payments were due, and the community was fracturing. In April of eighteen nineteen, the Separatists made a radical decision: they pooled everything. All land, all labor, all output would belong to the community collectively. In exchange, the Society of Separatists of Zoar would provide each member with everything they needed.

They went further. In eighteen twenty-two, the community adopted celibacy so that women could work the fields and shops instead of being sidelined by pregnancy and childcare. It was a theological position, but also a pragmatic one.

The celibacy ended when the canal came. In eighteen twenty-five, Ohio was building the Ohio and Erie Canal, and Zoar signed a contract to excavate seven miles of it through their lands for twenty-one thousand dollars. Women worked alongside men swinging picks and moving earth. The cash paid off the land debt. With financial security restored, the community voted to end celibacy in eighteen twenty-nine.

Zoar thrived for decades, operating mills, foundries, a hotel, and farms across seven thousand acres. Women held voting rights in Society elections, an extraordinary provision for the era. The experiment finally dissolved in eighteen ninety-eight, when the second and third generations decided they preferred private property to collective life.