The Rappites

Exerpt from: Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth

Century (1974). Seabury.

"Ironically the Harmonists or Rappites are remembered mostly as the predecessors of

Robert Owen’s colony at New Harmony. The Owenites lasted in their pure form scarcely
any time at all. New Harmony managed to commit most of the mistakes possible to an
intentional community and ended in a series of financial disasters. The Rappites
flourished, became exceedingly prosperous, and, although they are no longer
communists, their descendants can still be found in or near the old communities.

George Rapp was born in Württemberg, son of a small vineyardist, probably in 1757. At
the age of thirty he became a Separatist-Pietist preacher, and gradually accumulated
around himself a small sect which was persecuted by Lutherans and Calvinists alike. In
1803 he went to Baltimore seeking refuge from persecution for his people and bought
five thousand acres of still wild country in the Conoquenessing Valley north of
Pittsburgh. In the following year over seventeen hundred men, women, and children were
settled on the land and had organized the Harmony Society, at first as a cooperative, but
almost immediately as a communist community. The men were mostly hard-working,
practical farmers with considerable skills as builders and mechanics. In an extraordinarily
short time, a little over two years, they had produced a flourishing, almost self-sufficient
community. Each family was housed in its own home; there was a church, a school, a
grist mill, a large community barn, carpenter and blacksmith shops, a saw mill, a cannery,
a woolen mill, a distillery and wine cellar, and five hundred and fifty acres planted in
wheat, rye, tobacco, hemp, flax, vineyards, and poppies for sweet oil. Grazing in the
uncleared land were cattle, milch cows, pigs, horses, and the first merino sheep in
America. Most of their whiskey and brandy they sold, but they drank light wine at each
meal.

After ten years, when the colony had become rich and flourishing, they decided to move
because the land was not suitable for the production of satisfactory wine and in addition
lacked water communication with the outside world. They had already in 1807 adopted
celibacy as a general rule although husbands, wives, and children continued to live
together in separate family houses with so little strain that they have amazed everyone
who has ever written of them. In later years they often adopted children.

In 1814 they bought thirty thousand acres in the Wabash Valley in Indiana and sold the
first settlement for one hundred thousand dollars, a vast sum of money for those days, but
probably no more than the value of the improvements on the land. By 1815 they had all
moved to Indiana and a greatly improved village was rising around them. This was
Harmony, later to become famous as Robert Owen’s colony. Once again they flourished.
But in another ten years they decided that the site was malarial and the farmers around
them were antagonistic. In 1824 they sold the town and twenty thousand acres to Robert
Owen for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and moved back to near Pittsburgh on the
Ohio River and established a final settlement, the village of Economy, which endured
until the beginning of the twentieth century.

In less than twenty-five years they had built three well-equipped towns and cleared many
thousands of acres, a unique record not only for an intentional community but for any
kind of settlement. The Rappites owed their success to the kind of people they were,
skilled German, mostly Swabian, farmers, vineyardists, and mechanics, who were
satisfied with what would have seemed to the intellectuals, as we would call them today,
of the Woman in the Wilderness, a very low-pressure utopia. It needed only hard, skilled
work for them to establish and preserve a community which satisfied them.

Father Rapp was a man of great charismatic power but he was also gifted with common
sense. Belief in the imminence of the apocalypse and the Second Coming and the
millenarian kingdom may seem cranky, even ignorant and vulgar, to most people today.
But there was nothing very eccentric about such beliefs in the first half of the nineteenth
century. It was quite possible to hold them and yet be considered intellectually
respectable. And of course they were demonstrably the beliefs of the first generations of
Christians and probably of Jesus himself. Furthermore, as Albert Schweitzer has
demonstrated in our own day, an “eschatological ethic” is a remarkably effective rule of
life — “live as though the world is going to come to an end in the next twenty-four
hours.”

George Rapp provided the spiritual and moral leadership — the “father image” — and his
adopted son, Frederick Rapp, was at least as effective as an organizer, administrator, and
businessman before the Rappites ever left the Wabash. The younger Rapp had established
outlets for the products of the community throughout the settled Mississippi drainage and
had agents as far away as New Orleans. After George and Frederick Rapp had both died
the colony was equally lucky in the trustees and administrators it chose.

As the numbers dwindled the Rappites closed down many of their small shops and
invested largely in railroads and when the community finally dissolved it was still rich.
Their efficiency is well shown by the success they made of silk and wine. In those days
sericulture and viticulture bankrupted many an American farmer. For years the Rappites
planted their steeper hillsides with mulberry trees, raised silk worms, and spun and wove
and tailored their own garments of silk. They are certainly the only communists who
habitually went clad in silk. When eventually sericulture became completely unprofitable
and time-consuming they had the good sense to abandon it.

Only once was the even tenor of their ways disturbed. A manifest rogue, Bernard Müller,
who called himself Count Leon, wrote from Germany that he and his followers had been
converted and wished to join the colony. When he arrived he turned out to be a military
man and a wastrel who immediately tried to seize control of the finances. It took the
nonviolent ascetic Rappites a little over a year to get rid of him and his followers whom
they bought off with more than one hundred thousand dollars. One-third of the colony
left with Müller and established a settlement ten miles away and in less than a year lost
all their money; whereupon they attacked Economy with arms, but were driven off by a
posse raised among the neighboring communities. Bernard Müller and a few of his
people left for northern Louisiana, where he died of cholera.

The Count Leon episode was a godsend to Economy because it served to purge those
who were not sincerely committed to the Rappite way of life. From then on to the end of
the century no other serious factional disputes arose. To this day the descendants of the
community still get together for anniversaries. Many of them still live in the
neighborhood of Economy, and others near the industrial colony Economy founded at
Beaver Falls. The church in Economy still stands and the Evangelical Lutheran
congregation numbers several descendants of the Rappites. But it primarily enshrines the
memory of Robert Owens’ unsuccessful community rather than Father Rapp’s eminently
successful one which built most of the surviving buildings. "