Page 4 - Bulletin #67 - November 2020

of land on the Wabash River in southwestern Indiana. There they built New Harmony, to
this day one of America’s most beautiful museum villages.

George Rapp

But Rapp was still not ready to settle down permanently. Possessed by millennial anxiety
and mindful of the biblical image of the Sunwoman (Revelation 12) who fled into the
wilderness, he decreed another move, this time to a site in Pennsylvania not far from the
original Harmony. The relocation began in 1824. The new communal village was called
Economy, and there the society settled into its final home. Economy became a village of
nearly 1,000 members, a center of music and the arts and of learning, with a museum of
natural history and a labyrinth whose tangled paths and dead ends pointed believers to
the arduous path they had to tread before reaching paradise. But no matter how
attractive this community was, and how committed its members were to their Pietist
ideals, after a few years dissension began to surface. There were the kinds of personal 4
conflicts all too well known to students of communal history, and for some,
disillusionment with Father Rapp’s leadership.

Old Economy Village