EXPERIENCE
Finding Balance in
Historic New Harmony
PHOTOS & STORY BY JD DOTSON
Late last fall, my husband and I hopped into the
car and headed west. Destination: The southwest
corner of Indiana and the former utopian society
of New Harmony.
Settled in the early 1800s by the Harmony Society
– a communal religious group – under the leadership
of George Rapp, the wilderness on the edge of
the Wabash River was a perfectly isolated spot
to await the second coming. Less than a decade
after building the town, the Rappites returned to
Pennsylvania and sold the town to industrialist and
social reformer Robert Owen, who envisioned a
new moral world of “happiness, enlightenment and
20 EXTOL : FEBRUARY/MARCH 2019
prosperity through education, science, technology
and communal living.”
Renamed New Harmony, the experiment quickly
failed for a variety of reasons but has become a
center of national significance due to the early
introduction of a group of artists, educators and
scientists that arrived on a flatboat named the
“Philanthropist” or the “Boatload of Knowledge.”
New Harmony’s unique beginnings and rich history
are well documented at the Atheneum, the starting
place for our adventure and the official visitor
center of New Harmony.
Driving into the town, one of the first things we
noticed was the presence of golf carts zipping through
the streets. We asked one of the drivers and were
directed a few blocks down “to a building that looks
like it doesn’t belong.” The stark white and super
modern Atheneum sits just on the edge of the quaint
town near the Wabash River. Designed by Richard
Meier, the model and drawings of the building now
reside in the New York Museum of Modern Art and
have won numerous design awards. The Atheneum
is where you can watch a film about the history of
the town, schedule tours, pop into the gift shop for
a postcard (which they will mail for you!) and rent
golf carts, too. For such a small town, big adventures