USA > Indiana > Historic Indiana : being chapters in the story of the Hoosier state from the romantic period of foreign exploration and dominion through pioneer days, stirring war times, and periods of peaceful progress, to the present time > Part 17
USA > Indiana > Historic Indiana : being chapters in the story of the Hoosier state from the romantic period of foreign exploration and dominion through pioneer days, stirring war times, and periods of peaceful progress, to the present time, centennial ed. > Part 17
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About the time that railroads were first penetrating the West, there arose a great craze for the building of "plank roads." This was in response to the urgent demand for better wagon roads whereon to reach the markets. Timber was plentiful and cheap, and this material seemed to offer a solution of the good roads question. By the year 1850, four hundred miles of planked roads, at a cost of twelve to fifteen hundred dollars a mile, had been completed in the State. But by that time the first roads constructed had begun to show the weak points of the method of paving. When new, these roads carried the traveller along swimmingly; but when the planks began to wear thin, and the sills to rot out, and the grading or foundation to sink away, they became justly called "corduroy " roads, and were certainly a weariness to the flesh. In some low places, the construction sank entirely out of sight. Many miles of the roads became so execrable that the farmers drove alongside in the mud rather than "jostle their bones" over the logs and ruts of the artificial road.
By the time the people were recovering from the great losses of money from this form of highway, and their discouragement about better roads, it was
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discovered that Nature had endowed the State in many districts with vast gravel beds, unsurpassed for the construction of turnpikes. Companies were chartered to build and operate toll roads. These proved very profitable, and were also a blessing to the farmers who used them for heavy traffic. They served their day, and passed into the free gravel roads now owned by the counties.
Mr. Riley represents his old pioneers as talking reminiscently 1
"Of the times when we first settled here, and travel was so bad,
When we had to go on horseback, and sometimes on 'shanks mare,'
And 'blaze' a road fer them behind that had to travel there.
"And now we go a-trotten' 'long a level gravel pike, In a big two-hoss road-wagon, jest as easy as you like : Two of us on the front seat, and our wimmen-folks behind, A-settin' in theyr Winsor cheers in perfect peace of mind!"
The little toll-house at the side of the road with the superannuated couple on the front stoop has gone. The "pole and sweep" for closing the highway has disappeared. Better roads are still needed in most parts of the State, to bring it up to the high plane demanded for the truest economy and broadest civ- ilization, but those advantages are surely, if slowly, becoming general in more neighborhoods. At the close of the year 1905, there were in Indiana 16,268 miles of gravel roads.
A new means of transportation has dawned on the 1 Riley, James Whitcomb, Neighborly Poems, page 23. Indian- apolis, :891.
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State, and is becoming a great social factor through- out Indiana. The interurban trolley roads are ex- tending in all directions with astonishing rapidity. One corporation alone is operating over six hundred miles of electric lines and there are already thirteen hundred miles of electric roads within the bounds of the State and two thousand miles more projected. More than fifty millions have been invested. Indian- apolis is the greatest electric railway centre in the world. Passengers are carried through the State for one half former railroad fares, and parcels at reason- able rates. What this pleasant and rapid transpor- tation means to the rural population can hardly be realized by the denizens of cities. From a position of great social isolation, the farmer's family, along these routes, may come into close touch with near-by towns and cities.
Just now it seems hazardous to venture mention of the latest mode of locomotion in connection with the rural districts, but motor carriages have appeared upon the scene and are taking their place in both town and country. Progressive farmers are buying automobiles, many using them for power as well as for pleasure on the road. Motor wagons will still further eliminate distance between country and town.
With the national awakening to the vast oppor- tunity for improving transportation facilities by utilizing the natural arteries of commerce to create deep waterways through the heart of the continent, Indiana must share in the benefits, not only because of her nearness to other great streams, but because of her geographical position, and by the develop- ment of her own tributaries to the Mississippi. When these new plans for inland navigation are developed
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to their consistent goal, the old "Appian Way " will again be dotted with the commerce of the East, on its journey from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. Through the Wabash route, the produce of a great interior will join the Mississippi deep waterway. Through the Ohio with its improved channel, which flows along the entire southern border of the State, the traffic of that district will be accommodated. The Calumet, deepened, will furnish an outlet for the regions about Chicago; while by a canal across the northern part of Indiana, from Lake Erie, by way of the Maumee, to Lake Mich- igan, the shipping between New York and Chicago may avoid the detour of five hundred miles of stormy lake travel, around the peninsula. Canals were once bankrupted by the incoming of railroads, and became obsolete; but with the enormous increase in the pop- ulation and foreign commerce, the traffic of the coun- try has outgrown the railroads; and, with the aid of electricity for rapid propelling power, canals must come into their own again. The shades of the early pioneers who worked so hard for improved transpor- tation may hover over the fleets on their way across the State, and contemplate Indiana as a sea-going community !
We have travelled the centuries from pirogue to automobile and electric trolley; we have seen the first white man paddle his canoe to the trading-post; have jogged with the pioneer over muddy roads, and immigrated with the early settlers in the prairie schooner, or with them have poled their flatboats up the rivers. We have welcomed, with them, the little steamers and packets on the waterways; have seen steam applied to land locomotives, relegating all other modes of transportation to desuetude; and in
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turn have seen this, with all other methods, being surpassed by electricity. Before us has passed the panorama of the evolution of transportation, epito- mizing the progress of civilization in Indiana.
As the quaint vehicles of the past roll slowly down the highways toward oblivion, we wave good-bye. With a sigh for the wearisome journeys they entailed, we look forward with wonder and interest to what the future has in store, in the development of the means of transportation.
CHAPTER XII
THE SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS AT NEW HARMONY
T HOSE who are interested in the social problems of the day may wish to review the record of the experiments at New Harmony. They are an example of the failures in the establishment of socialistic communities, in a State where individualism is the pronounced belief of the whole people. Whether collectivism, in any form, will be congenial to the American spirit, it is too soon, perhaps, to declare. In that earlier day, however, the hardy frontiersmen looked upon the experiments of Owen and Rapp as a theory of social life which was in direct opposition to the independent freedom which they had come into the wilderness, at a great sacrifice, to secure. Individual initiative was the key to the character of the Westerner. He made it his creed. He was aroused to suspicion and antagonism by any encroachments of dictation regarding the forms of his religious belief, the family life, or contract for his labor. Hence the neighbors of the autocrat of Harmonie, and afterward the social reformer, David Owen, were lacking in sympathy and appreciation of the colossal efforts of the two great innovators. A few of the settlers sent their young people to the incomparable schools es- tablished by Owen. More of them bought articles
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that were manufactured by the Rappite community. Sympathy with the theories of the communists, they had none. A few visionaries, in different parts of the southern section of the State, and in other States, followed afar off, and made experiments of their own, lasting a few months, in community life. But the settlers, in general, combated the ideas promulgated at New Harmony.
This little village in southern Indiana will interest us by its unique history, two socialistic communes having succeeded each other on this attractive spot in the lower Wabash Valley. These communities, established in the early part of the nineteenth century, live only in history; but they brought to Indiana one of the most interesting phases of co-operative life known to the nation. Many volumes have been written on the history of the communities, the theo- ries that they represented, and the lives of their founders and co-workers, but a brief account of their existence is necessary in any story of Indiana.
In the spring of 1815, George Rapp led his German peasant followers from their settlement in Pennsyl- vania to the wilderness of Territorial Indiana. They came down the Ohio River and fifty miles up the Wabash in flatboats laden with the community goods, implements of labor and manufacture, and landed at the beautiful location previously chosen by Frederick Rapp. In imagination we see the eight hundred men, women, and children, clad in the quaint costume of their native Würtemberg, kneeling on the bank of the forest stream, and joining with Father Rapp in dedicating "Harmonie" to the purposes of a primitive, Christian brotherhood. These people belonged to the stolid German peasant class, and
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joined their fortunes with George Rapp, to emigrate to a free country, and worship God according to their own peculiar beliefs, which were the teachings of Father Rapp. He was a strong-willed man, a very arbitrary over-lord, and the simple band implicitly followed where he guided them. The newly acquired estate comprised about thirty thousand acres, of the most fertile lands that bordered on the beautiful river. The tract was covered with the magnificent primeval forest usual in Indiana. The hillsides were suited to the planting of vineyards; and the river, as was foreseen, furnished a highway to the markets, and water-power for their various mills. A dozen years before this time, their autocratic leader had led his followers forth from the fatherland to the wilds of Pennsylvania, and had planted a wonderfully successful community there. They had labored with such industry and plodding faithfulness, under the wise management of George Rapp and his adopted son Frederick, that their common property was con- sidered sacrificed, when it was sold for one hundred thousand dollars, upon their departure for Indiana. The Territory of Indiana at that time had but few settlers, and these were located through the southern tier of counties, on scattered clearings, and in tiny villages. There, the zealous Rappite community soon found that the opening up of the fertile acres exposed them to the prevailing malaria, which had proven so deadly to all the pioneers. The mortality among their membership, the first four or five years, ap- palled them, and, it is said, determined their resolution to sell the great plantation as soon as it could be made attractive to a purchaser. Gradually, however, as the lands were cultivated, the unhealthfulness dis-
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appeared; until, in the latest years of their sojourn, there were only two or three deaths a year. These thrifty people planted orchards, and vineyards, and broad acres of grain. Their gardens were models, and their flocks and herds multiplied in the meadows. After they had provided themselves with temporary cabins, they built a village of homes and commu- nity houses, a fort, a granary, saw-mill, woollen mill, brickyard, distillery, brewery, and a silk factory. Eventually, they built shops in the town for all the trades.
The homely buildings they erected are still in use, testifying to the integrity of their workmanship, if not to their artistic sense of design. One of the large community houses is now used as a tavern, another as a theatre, and one as a general store; and on the outer wall the same old sun-dial marks the hours for the twentieth century inhabitants, that served to assemble the plodding peasants for their march to the fields. The church in which all worshipped was built on the plan which Father Rapp claimed had come to him in a revelation. It was in the form of a Greek cross and was nearly one hundred and twenty feet in length. The roof was supported by twenty- eight pillars of walnut, cherry, and sassafras wood. The walnut logs measured six feet in circumference. The exterior of the church was not attractive archi- tecturally, but an English traveller wrote that one could scarcely imagine himself in the wilds of Indiana, on the borders of the Wabash, while walking through the long resounding aisles and surveying the stately colonnades of this cathedral-like church.
During all their sojourn in the State, this pecu- liar people saw nothing of the outside world and its
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attractions. The adopted son, Frederick Rapp, was the business representative for the community. He it was that introduced any saving leaven of variety into their lives. Flower-gardens and a band of music were allowed them to relieve the dead monotony of the prescribed round of their existence. The people, both men and women, toiled in the shops and fields for the common treasury. Each day they rose before six o'clock, and after breakfasting went forth in a procession to the daily tasks. Marriage was not allowed, and the only increase in their numbers were the accessions from Germany. The squatters on the lands near the community were too fond of their free and independent life to be attracted to such an autocracy. The homely dress worn was all of their own manufacture; both men and women wore home-made straw hats, short jackets of coarse material, and a skirt or trousers of the same goods. There were flowers in the doorways, and there was a pleasant regulation which provided an excellent band of music that played in the public garden at sunset, and on the hillsides, when the peasants were laboring in the fields. The people were industrious, kind, strictly temperate-not even the use of tobacco being allowed. Their honest and upright dealing assured their communal success, everything that they sold being of excellent quality and strictly as they represented it to be. The trade of the community extended from Pittsburg to New Orleans, and they had branch stores at Vincennes and across the Illinois line.
In any estimate of the achievements of this experi- ment in community life, it must be remembered that the membership was united by a strong religious bond, that they were all producers, were all peasants
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who had been accustomed to being suppressed, and that they were ignorant of the language of America. They were from a dull and stolid social stratum, and had enjoyed little religious or political liberty in Germany, very meagre material comforts, and few pleasures, so that the lack of freedom of initiative in their restricted existence at Harmonie seemed, to most of them, offset by the creature comforts sup- plied to all of the commune.
The good business management of the leaders and the patient, plodding industry of the united member- ship, celibacy which restricted the increase of un- productive members, and their belief in the near approach of the judgment day which made them careless of owning private property, contributed toward the increase of community wealth. It was said that when the Harmonists left Indiana their funds amounted to a million dollars, which in that primitive time was a vast sum. "In May, 1824, we have departed," was scrawled under the stairway in one of the community houses. Back to Pennsylvania, this time on the borders of the Ohio River, eighteen miles below Pittsburg, George Rapp led his stolid followers to a new place which they named Economy. Was it to prevent any measure of rest being their portion, a fear that luxurious living might entice his flock from strict obedience? Or was it to be nearer the Eastern markets? No statement is left to tell why the autocrat sold Old Harmonie, and began the labori- ous task of creating a new settlement. Mrs. Blake, in her story of the commune, called Heart's Haven, gives a vivid impression of the life in that circum- scribed community, with all of its suppressed emotions of mother love, and natural longing for separate homes,
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and a return to their marriage vows, and recognition of the family life. .
When Richard Flower, a neighboring communist on the Illinois side of the Wabash, was going back to England, George Rapp commissioned him to sell the Harmonie estate, if possible, and Flower received $5000 for accomplishing the transfer. He made the sale to Robert Owen, a famous Scotch philanthropist, who had been conducting a successful commune in the manufacturing town of New Lanark. Mr. Owen took over the whole of the great property with its substantial improvements, paying about $150,000 for it. It is said that double the sum received would have been a modest estimate of the value of the princely estate and well-built town. When the faithful Rappists had settled in their new location in Pennsylvania, the same industry and capable leadership continued their material prosperity. George Rapp died in 1847. He was succeeded in command by Elders elected by the community. "These men were able and honorable, we are glad to know; for the sake of the quiet creatures drowsing away their remnant of life, fat and contented, or driving their plows through the fields, or sitting on the stoops of the village houses when evening comes." 1 In 1874, years after their exodus, the Rappists sent back to their old community in Indiana and repur- chased the church edifice. They used part of the stone and brick for a wall about their ancient burying- ground; giving the lot and the wing of the building for the Working Men's Institute Library, in memory of the Harmonie Society founded by George Rapp in 1815.
The prosperity of the commune, in their new location,
' Lockwood, Geo. B., The New Harmony Movement, page 34.
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was so great that in the seventies the wealth of the Rappists was estimated to be any sum from ten to thirty millions of dollars. These values dwindled with the passing of the membership by death and from the poor management of later leaders. The community ceased to exist, and became a corporation of individual holdings. From a material point of view it was one of the few successful communes, but Robert Owen saw wherein it was a failure. It contravened an important law of nature when it forbade family ties. The animal nature had been sufficiently cared for, they looked well fed and decently clothed and free from business anxieties, but Rapp's disciples had bought this immunity from bread-and-butter cares dearly-even at the expense of the heart and head. By the greatest imaginable contrast, the leaders of the new community, which entered into the possession of New Harmony, as they re-christened it, were as- sembled for the pursuit of the things of the spirit along intellectual paths-for culture for its own sake, for research in science, and particularly for educational advancement.
Robert Owen was a dreamer. He was of those who have visions of a better future for mankind. To obtain the right environment for instituting a new social system, on the community plan, he bought the magnificent estate of New Harmony. Of this selection he said:
"No site for a number of communities, in close union together, can be found finer than that which surrounds us. Its natural situation and the variety of its natural productions exceed anything I have seen in Europe or America; the rich land, intermixed with rivers, islands, woods, and hills in beautiful proportions to each other,
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presents a prospect which highly gratifies every intelligent beholder." 1
The village on the domain, which had been built by the Rappites, the new commune diverted to the various needs of the different classes of inhabitants. The factories were retained, the community houses were used for the members and for the new boarding- schools. The vast church was converted into an assembly hall, for the town meetings, weekly concerts and balls, and the various lectures that were given. The second-story rooms in the wings were used for reading, debating, and music rooms. The frame church was retained for religious meetings, and day and night schools.
Of Robert Owen, the founder of New Harmony, his biographer, Lloyd Jones, tells us that the great reformer was born in Wales in 1771. After a few short years of schooling, which he appreciated so unusually, the lad, at the age of ten, went to London as a draper's apprentice. In the home of his employers he found a library, and read omnivorously during every leisure moment. After learning his trade, he worked at it until his eighteenth year, saving every cent possible; for in his whole life, it is said, he never indulged in an injurious or expensive habit. Starting in a manufacturing business with five hundred dollars capital, he went steadily onward, through various changes of partnerships, in the cotton spinning and allied trades, until he had accumulated a large fortune.
During these years of marked success in business, Robert Owen had constantly devoted much of his time and thought to the amelioration of the wretched
1 Lockwood, Geo. B., page 70. New York, 1905.
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condition of the laboring classes throughout the United Kingdom. After acquiring the factory town of New Lanark, which was typical in its drunkenness, squalor, and ignorance, he made that village renowned as a happy and orderly community of factory hands. At that time he met and was married to Miss Dale, whose name was coupled with that of Owen in naming each of their children. To New Lanark, it is said, came representatives of royalty, philanthropists, and educators from all parts of Europe, who journeyed thither to study the processes which Mr. Owen put in operation for the betterment of the working people in his mills, making them the most happy and orderly in all England. At the same time, in agitation and in national legislation, every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers, linked itself to the name of Robert Owen. He wrote voluminously, and labored unceasingly, for the re- form of factory laws, for the establishment of co- operative societies, and for better conditions of living for the wage-earners. Frederick Engles has left the statement that as long as Robert Owen was merely a philanthropist he was rewarded with applause, wealth, honor, and glory. He was the most popular man in Europe, not only with men of his own class, but with statesmen and princes, who listened to him approvingly.
This was the man who entered into the project of establishing in Indiana a communistic colonization scheme which he had long advocated. His son has recorded that the offer of the Rappites to sell a village, already built on a vast tract of land capable of sup- porting tens of thousands of people, in a new and free country, was the determining cause of Mr. Owen's
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closing the purchase of Harmonie. He and his sons gave up every comfort and luxury in England that he might have a vast theatre in which to try his plans of social reform.
It was in 1825 that Mr. Owen came into possession of the thirty thousand acres of land, three thousand of which were under cultivation. Full of hope and noble enthusiasm, he inaugurated the plans for the "new moral world," which was to be an organ- ization of society to rationally educate and employ all classes, giving a new existence to man by surround- ing him with superior circumstances only. In contrast to the Rappite theory, education, pleasant environ- ment, culture, and freedom of thought were to take the place of ignorance, an absence of amusements, and of an arbitrary ecclesiastical autocracy, to hold the band of people together.
Invitations to membership included all who were in sympathy with Robert Owen's belief in the need of a new form of society. In the course of his address in the halls of Congress at Washington, he said:
"In the heart of the United States, and almost in the centre of its unequalled internal navigation, that Power which governs and directs the universe, and every action of man, has arranged circumstances which were far beyond my control, and permits me to commence a new empire of peace and good-will to men, founded on other principles than those of the present or the past. I have, however, no wish to lead the way. I am desirous that governments should become masters of the subject, adopt the prin- ciples, encourage the practice, and thereby retain the direction of the public mind for their own benefit, and the benefit of the people. But as I have not the control of circumstances in this public course, I must show what
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