Harmony: The Utopians Who Moved Twice

In eighteen oh four, a German separatist named Johann Georg Rapp led some eight hundred followers out of Württemberg and across the Atlantic to Pennsylvania. Back home, they had faced harassment from the Lutheran Church for their unorthodox beliefs: communal property, strict celibacy, and the conviction that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent, probably within their lifetimes. Rapp believed a community of the righteous needed to be ready.

They purchased land in Butler County and in eighteen oh five founded the town they called Harmony. Within a decade it was one of the most prosperous small communities in Pennsylvania. By eighteen fourteen, the Harmony Society had built roughly one hundred fifty structures: a brewery, two distilleries, two flour mills, two woolen factories, a four-story granary, a hemp mill, a nail factory, a dyeing works, and six large brick houses. All property was held in common. All profits flowed to the community. And because the Harmonists practiced celibacy, every adult was available to work. Their output per person was extraordinary.

Then they moved. In eighteen fourteen, calculating that Indiana Territory offered cheaper land and better river access to western markets, Rapp sold the Pennsylvania town and led his congregation west to a new site on the Wabash River, which they also called Harmonie. They prospered there too, building another model town in ten years. Then in eighteen twenty-five Rapp sold that town as well, this time to the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen for one hundred fifty thousand dollars. Owen renamed it New Harmony and tried to build a secular utopia on the same ground the religious communalists had left behind. He failed within two years. The Harmonists walked back to Pennsylvania and founded a third town, Economy, near Pittsburgh, where they lived out the rest of their movement's life.

The first Harmony, here in Butler County, was designated a National Historic Landmark District in nineteen seventy-four. The brick buildings that survive from the Rapp era still stand on the quiet streets of present-day Harmony Borough, among the most intact early nineteenth century communal settlement landscapes in the United States.