New Harmony, Indiana

By Connie A. Weinzapfel, Darrel E. Bigham and Susan R. Branigin

New Harmony is a town like no other. A community that
began almost two hundred years ahead of its time, New Harmony was a spiritual sanctuary that later became a haven for international scientists, scholars, and educators who sought equality in communal living. It was impossible for George Rapp
to realize the events he would set into motion when he purchased 20,000 acres of land on the Wabash River in 1814 and subsequently sold it to social reformer Robert Owen ten years later. This simple
community came to have an immense impact on our country s art and architecture, public education system, women s suffrage movement, Midwestern industrial development, and more. This book contains over 150 historic images produced by two 19th-century New Harmony photographers Homer Fauntleroy
and William Frederick Lichtenberger. These photographs show historic buildings of New Harmony, many of which have been razed over the years. They also demonstrate the importance of the Wabash River and its influence on settlement and commerce. The people of the community are captured at work and at play, and the reader is allowed a look at the downtown business district of the past and the farms surrounding it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Dec 7, 1999
• ISBN: 9781439627327

Connie A. Weinzapfel

Connie A. Weinzapfel is the director of Historic New Harmony, Darrel E. Bigham is a professor of history at the University of Southern Indiana as well as a noted author, and Susan R. Branigin is assistant curator at New Harmony State Historic Site. Together they have created a rich visual history of New Harmony, Indiana, capturing the turn of the twentieth century and the centennial celebration of this historic town.

Book preview

bicentennial.

INTRODUCTION

Approaching its centennial in 1914, New Harmony was a small market town that shared many of the features of its counterparts in the lower Wabash and Ohio valleys. But New Harmony was not exactly like other places. Resources, location, economic patterns, leadership, culture, and fate made the fabric and texture of New Harmony different. It was also distinctive because of the features in its earliest years—buildings, town plan, names of streets, descendants of the utopians, and cultural inheritance. About 230 Harmonists, for instance, lay in repose in the cemetery at the western edge of the town. No place in the country has a more interesting history, wrote W.P. Leonard, Posey County’s first historian, in 1882. New Harmony, he insisted, was probably more widely known than any other town of its size in the country ... solely due to the relations which the Rappites and Owens bore towards it.

The town’s origins were distinctive. Founded in 1814 by one set of German utopians who left ten years later, it was the site of a second community, established in 1824 by the British industrialist and utopian, Robert Owen. Owen attracted a number of intellectuals whose legacies extended far beyond his short-lived experiment. His children also played an important part in the town’s development and in regional and national