The story of the Harmonists, one of the most successful of all the communistic colonies is even more interesting.  The founder, Johann Georg Rapp, had been a weaver and vine gardener in the little village of Iptingen in Wuerttemberg.  He drew upon himself and his followers the displeasure of the Church by teaching that religion was a personal matter between the individual and his God; that the Bible, not the pronouncements of the clergy, should be the guide to the true faith, and that the ordinances of the Church were not necessarily the ordinances of God.  The petty persecutions which these doctrines brought upon him and his fellow separatists turned them towards liberal America.  In 1803 Rapp and some of his companions crossed the sea and selected as a site for their colony five thousand acres of land in Butler County, Pennsylvania.  There they built the new town of Harmony, to which came about six hundred persons, all told.  On February 15, 1805 they organized the Harmony Society and signed a solemn agreement to merge all their possessions in one common lot.[16] Among them were a few persons of education and property, but most of them were sturdy, thrifty mechanics and peasants, who, under the skillful direction of Father Rapp, soon transformed the forest into a thriving community.  After a soul stirring revival in 1807, they adopted celibacy.  Those who were married did not separate but lived together in solemn self-restraint, “treating each other as brother and sister in Christ."[17] Their belief that the second coming of the Lord was imminent no doubt strengthened their resolution.  At this time, also, the men all agreed to forego the use of tobacco—­no small sacrifice on the part of hard-working laborers.

The region, however, was unfavorable to the growth of the grape, which was the favorite Wuerttemberg crop.  In 1814 the society accordingly sold the communal property for $100,000 and removed to a site on the Wabash River, in Indiana, where, under the magic of their industry, the beautiful village of New Harmony arose in one year, and where many of their sturdy buildings still remain a testimony to their honest craftsmanship.  Unfortunately, however, two pests appeared which they had not foreseen.  Harassed by malaria and meddlesome neighbors, Father Rapp a third time sought a new Canaan.  In 1825 he sold the entire site to Robert Owen, the British philanthropic socialist, and the Harmonists moved back to Pennsylvania.  They built their third and last home on the Ohio, about twenty miles from Pittsburgh, and called it Economy in prophetic token of the wealth which their industry and shrewdness would soon bring in.