Perhaps if the inhabitants of Robert Owens’ New Harmony had spent
a little more time in the Yellow
Tavern, their utopian dreams might not have been such a bust.
The Yellow Tavern has been around as long as New Harmony,
Ind., roughly since 1815, though it is only recently that fried
brains have been added to the menu and Brooks and Dunn to the
jukebox.
The saloon’s first incarnation was on Tavern Street, but
that venerable establishment went up in flames in the mid-19th
century. A new tavern was hurriedly built at the present location
on Church Street, the town’s main drag. In the winter, when we
like to visit, the tavern is crowded with mild mannered locals
who push two or three tables together and commence to toss back
Bud Selects and nosh on the tavern’s justly famous thin crust
pizza, or, that southern Indiana favorite, lightly fried beef
brains on a bun. During festival weather, New Harmony loses its
tranquil atmosphere, which defeats the whole purpose of your
visit, but in winter the town is the most peaceful, meditative of
places, and you can see why the original settlers picked this
location nearly two hundred years ago.
New Harmony was first settled by an odd German
religious sect under the leadership of the prophet
Johann Georg Rapp. The Harmonists were
millennialists who sought an out-of-the-way place to await the
End Times. They practiced celibacy and shunned tobacco, but they
weren’t expected to be completely miserable. After building
shelter and a meeting house, the industrious and ingenious
Harmonists set about constructing a brewery, two distilleries,
and the Yellow Tavern. According to historian William E. Wilson,
“the Harmonist brewery produced five hundred gallons a day,” much
of which was barreled and loaded onto flatboats and steamers and
sold at ports up and down the river.
When a decade passed and the End Times hadn’t arrived as
expected, the Harmonists dispiritedly returned to Pennsylvania,
put their Indiana town up for sale, and rethought their belief
system, particularly the prohibition on tobacco and sex.
New Harmony was immediately purchased, lock, stock and
barrel, by Robert Owen. Owen was a Welsh industrialist and social
reformer who’d made a small fortune in the cotton business by
adopting the novel idea that mill workers deserved humane
treatment. His fortune secure, Owen began dabbling in the dark
sciences of socialism. He laid out his principles in his tract
New View of Society, ideas which included a “rational
deistic religion, modified free love, and abolition of private
property.” Dismissed by his critics, Owen set out to put his
theories into practice by creating the “world in reverse.” In
order to do so he needed to find a place unsullied by the
industrial revolution. Such a place was New Harmony. Arriving
here in 1825, Owen proclaimed a new dawn in his “Declaration of
Mental Independence”:
I now declare to you and to the world, that Man, up to
this hour, has been in all parts of the earth, a slave to a
Trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to
inflict mental and physical evil upon his whole race. I refer
to Private or Individual Property, Absurd and Irrational
systems of Religion, and Marriage.
Like many social reformers, Owen was a charismatic,
eloquent, and driven fellow, but completely lacking in common
sense. He convinced some of the finest philosophers, scientists,
and intellectuals of the day to join his utopian adventure. But
while these men knew their way around libraries and laboratories,
they were at a loss when it came time to planting, tilling the
soil, harvesting, or any of the other necessary chores of a
wilderness community. Almost no one had used a plow before. Roger
Sandall notes that by one estimate nine-tenths of the membership
was useless. Later, one of the New Harmony participants, Josiah
Warren, would blame the failure of the community on the lack of
individual sovereignty and private property.
Owen then made yet another boneheaded mistake. He placed
restrictions on the brewing and drinking of ale. The one group of
Owenites who actually knew how to work a plow — a group of
English farmers — immediately broke off relations with the
Owenites and formed their own wet community across town.
By 1827, New Harmony’s economy was in ruins, weeds covered
the fields, the buildings were in disrepair, and Owen was selling
off lots to private individuals and allowing free market reforms.
Later that year, he left New Harmony for good.
Today, the good folks of New Harmony are a hardy, pragmatic
bunch, farmers and small business owners mostly, and because of
that their town has never been more prosperous. It may not be
utopia, but as long as there is a Yellow Tavern, it is well worth
a visit.
