Harmony: A Utopian Community on the Pennsylvania Frontier

In eighteen oh four, a German preacher named George Rapp led a group of Lutheran Separatists out of their homeland and into the Pennsylvania wilderness. They purchased about forty-five hundred acres in Butler County and began building a town they called Harmonie, meaning peace. Rapp believed the Second Coming was imminent, so the community practiced celibacy and held all property in common.

Every member handed their earnings to Father Rapp, who distributed what each family needed. Within six years, Harmony had grown to seven hundred members, two thousand cultivated acres, and more than one hundred buildings, including mills, a brewery, and a tannery. Then, in eighteen fourteen, Rapp sold the entire town to a Mennonite group and led his followers to Indiana to start over.

They would eventually return to Pennsylvania and found a third community. The Harmony Society finally dissolved in nineteen oh five, nearly a century after Rapp crossed the Atlantic. The original village survives as a National Historic Landmark.