Butler County and the Harmony Society

Butler County was formed on March twelfth, eighteen hundred, carved out of Allegheny County and named for General Richard Butler, a Revolutionary War officer. The county seat was established at the town of Butler three years later. What the county formation marker does not say is that this ground had already seen a young George Washington pass through in seventeen fifty-three, when he was just twenty-one years old and on a mission for Virginia's governor to deliver an ultimatum to the French near Lake Erie.

And in eighteen oh four, a religious community unlike any other in America arrived here: the Harmony Society, led by Johann Georg Rapp from the German state of Wurttemberg. The Harmonists were communal celibates who pooled all property, practiced crafts, and awaited the Second Coming. They built the town of Harmony here and stayed until eighteen fifteen before moving on to Indiana and later to Economy, Pennsylvania.