Читать книгу New Harmony, Indiana - Jane Blaffer Owen - Страница 22

For a path to become a road, it is not enough that one person travels it, opens it. The traces of those steps would be erased immediately if other persons did not gather the signs, did not step into the same footprints, did not make the path just traced more passable by their traveling it.

—The dedication from the booklet honoring Maria De Mattias on the fiftieth anniversary of her beatification, October 1, 2000¹

CHAPTER 5

Harmonist Church and School

Kenneth and I were not alone in our respect for the achievements of New Harmony’s founding fathers and mothers and in our love of the land. Thomas Mumford and John Elliott, whose New Harmony roots reached back as far as my husband’s, also returned to land their ancestors had farmed. Consciously or not, these descendants of British citizens who had arrived in New Harmony in the 1820s were reenacting the early American tradition of sons who worked their ancestors’ land. This custom decreased during the transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial one. Sons left family farms for cities, and small towns withered. The story of human erosion is well known. We are less aware of exceptions to this pattern.

These three public-spirited and well-educated men returned as farmers and civic leaders. They were not bedazzled by utopia, like the members of two previous societies. They had no thought of holding their goods in common, as did the Harmonists, or of realizing Robert Owen’s ambitious plan for a quadrangular Phalanstery for communal living. Each one brought his city-bred wife, who also embraced the town and its history.

The regeneration of New Harmony resumed in the 1940s with the friendship and collaboration of the Owen, Mumford, and Elliott families, a nucleus for unfolding events. I thank heaven that we newlyweds did not enter a vacuum of nonremembrance. A small, caring minority of townspeople, who were aware of the unmined gold that lay beneath their feet, welcomed us. They had lacked the means and the youthful energy to bring these riches to the light of day, but they had tried and in significant ways succeeded. Mary Fauntleroy, for instance, saved the Harmonist Community House No. 2 from demolition (19 on town map).

Laura Corbin Monical was my nearest neighbor and first friend in New Harmony. This extraordinary “widow lady,” the local title for women who had lost their husbands, lived in her parents’ home, the fading, white-pillared Rapp-Maclure-Owen House, across the lawn from the Lab. Miss Laura spent her mornings removing cobwebs from the fourteen-foot-high ceilings of the old house. Her cleaning tool consisted of two broom handles joined together and topped with dust rags. For this daily ritual, Miss Laura covered her red wig with an eighteenth-century ruffled linen cap and enveloped her short stature with a wide apron. Her words of friendship to me were, “If you see me in the morning, Jane, don’t speak because I will be very busy. Do drop by later in the day for a cup of tea.” Traces of beauty remained in her aged face; I could easily believe that a member of Indianapolis’s Fortune family had once sought her hand in marriage.

My husband started his schooling in a building across Church Street from the Corbins’ house and the Lab (9 on town map). He and generations of schoolchildren since 1874 had entered their classrooms through a door designed by Frederick Rapp, sometimes called the “Door of Promise,” that had once been the principal entrance to the brick Harmonist church. I prize a photo of Kenneth’s grandmother and mother in a horse-drawn carriage before that handsome building.

A brief history of the brick Harmonist church will be helpful. In 1822, the Harmonists began construction of a large brick church (on the west side of their original wooden church) that was finished not long before Robert Owen purchased New Harmony (20 on town map). The impressive church was one of the most significant buildings on the American frontier during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. During and after the Owen/Maclure Experiment, the cruciform church was unfortunately converted to secular purposes as New Harmony’s multipurpose hall. The east arm of the cross was used for dancing, the south arm for a theater, and the other two for libraries (the original location of the Maclure Working Men’s Institute). A clutter of shed-like wooden structures had been added later for pork packing.

Rumors of this desecration reached the devout Harmonists now living in Economy, Pennsylvania. They were understandably disturbed. Consistent with their practice of bringing important matters before the entire community, prayer sessions were held in their church in Economy. With characteristic dignity and liberality, the Harmonists selected Jonathan Lenz, son of David Lenz, to return to New Harmony in 1874 in order to purchase and demolish the church. The sum of two thousand dollars and a sufficient supply of bricks salvaged from the old church were given to the town for a cemetery wall (22 on town map). The plans were drawn by a student of Frederick Rapp’s architectural school, hence its superior character. This enclosure was for the Germans who had died in New Harmony and been placed in unmarked graves alongside those of the Woodland Indians, who were likewise unidentified except by low, grass-covered mounds. Both the Indians and Harmonists, despite their dissimilar cultures, believed their departed dead did not need individual markers on Earth, because they were already known by the Spirit of God. With the remaining bricks, a school was built in 1874 that also incorporated from the cruciform church the Door of Promise with its golden rose and a puzzling quotation attributed to chapter 4, verse 8 of Micah incised in the pediment above: “Unto thee shall come the golden rose.”²

In 1913, the town fathers made the unwise decision to raze the 1874 brick school, on the pretext that it was unstable, to make way for a new school. Fortunately, Miss Laura was on the scene at the time of the school’s demolition. Righteous indignation still throbbed in her voice as she recounted the story to me in the early 1940s: “It took a mule team three days to pull down each wall; but the most wicked thing of all was when the men in charge carted that door with its golden rose of Micah to the dump. I gave them a big piece of my mind, and they brought the door back.” After she notified the mayor about the Door of Promise, the architect and contractor were obliged to incorporate it into the 1913 school building. The Women’s Library Club members approved Miss Laura’s motion that they assume responsibility, with the community, for restoring the door, which became the west entrance to the 1913 school. Miss Laura was the first to confront an enemy of preservation.

School built in 1874 with bricks from the demolished Harmonist cruciform church.

Photograph by Homer Fauntleroy, March 21, 1905. Don Blair Collection. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Southern Indiana.

I view Miss Laura’s rescue of the consecrated church door as a decisive factor in the ongoing battle between the secular and the sacred for the physical heart of New Harmony. As much as I admire Robert Owen, the lessons of history do not support his stubbornly held theory that education alone, without the complementary discipline of religion, would prevent the human race from suicide. I never questioned Owen’s heart. He labored throughout his long life for the betterment and happiness of mankind, achieving those goals in New Lanark, Scotland, but falling short of them in New Harmony.

School built in 1913 with the saved Door of Promise (photograph taken in 1919).

Don Blair Collection. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Southern Indiana.

Door of Promise, 1959.

Photograph by John Doane. John Doane Collection. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Southern Indiana.

About six hundred years earlier, another ardent reformer, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, had also acted from purity of heart. In launching the Second Crusade from the hilltop Cathedral of Vézelay in 1145, his sole and passionate desire was to reconquer Jerusalem and Palestine to gain access to the sacred sites of Christ’s birth, life, crucifixion, and resurrection. Legend tells us that Bernard accented his rhetoric with tattered pieces of his cloak, scattering them among the multitudes who had come to hear this charismatic saint. Inevitably, only a few shared St. Bernard’s zeal. The vast majority who joined this disastrous crusade went for plunder.

Similarly, Chuang Tzu, the Taoist sage who lived in the fourth and third centuries BC, understood the paradox: “When justice and benevolence are in the air, a few people are really concerned with the good of others, but the majority are aware that this is a good thing, ripe for exploitation. They take advantage of the situation. For them, benevolence and justice are traps to catch birds. Thus benevolence and justice rapidly come to be associated with fraud and hypocrisy.”³

Apart from the educators, scientists, artists, and teachers, many of those who followed Owen and Maclure to New Harmony came for free meals and board. Summital thinking can prevent highly placed individuals, even saints, from reading the thoughts and intentions of those in the valley below.

In 1988, Historic New Harmony received permission and funding from the State of Indiana to remove the unremarkable 1913 school with its cluster of tacked-on buildings and to create in its place what is now known as Church Park. Many of us considered this an act of redemption. Others, especially those who had been taught there, thought it a desecration. Some townspeople considered ways the outdated school building could be given new life, but they did not prevail. No one regrets, however, the present-day one-story, handicap-accessible, energy-saving replacement school on twelve acres of traffic-free land southeast of town made possible by the Lilly Endowment (21 on area map).

Church Park was dedicated April 18, 1997. Townspeople and visitors can now enter through a brick and limestone arch that replicates the original Harmonist portal. The fragile Door of Promise, which for so many years received the touch of the hands of pious Harmonists and New Harmony’s schoolchildren, is safely stored. Well-trimmed hedges recall the cruciform shape of the brick Harmonist church; they reach out from a central circle into empty space, thirsty for the Fountain of Commitment, which I gave in memory of my husband. Water flows from the sculpture of interlocking bronze and glass circles by Don Gummer.

Fountain of Commitment in Church Park.

Photograph by Darryl D. Jones, October 2009. Courtesy of the artist, Don Gummer, © 2001, cast bronze, 77 × 32 × 26 inches.