After traveling through southern Illinois I stopped in New Harmony, Ind.New Harmony is a historic town on the Wabash River in Harmony Township, Posey County, Indiana, 15 miles (24 km) north of Mount Vernon, Indiana, the county seat. New Harmony, formerly named Harmony, was founded by the Harmony Society, headed by German immigrant George Rapp (actually Johann Georg Rapp) in 1814. This was the second of three towns built by the pietist, communal German religious group, known as Harmonists, Harmonites or Rappites. The other two towns founded by the Harmonites were Harmony, Pennsylvania (their first town), and Economy, Pennsylvania (now called Ambridge, Pennsylvania.) When the society decided to move back to Pennsylvania around 1824, they sold the 30,000 acres (121 km²) of land and buildings to Robert Owen, the Welsh utopian thinker and social reformer, and to William Maclure for $150,000, who then changed the name from "Harmony" to "New Harmony." Owen recruited residents to his model community, but a number of factors led to an early breakup of the communitarian experiment.

Labels: common good, historic, history, Indiana, New Harmony, socialism, Utopian