of their community. The present head, both spiritual
and temporal, is a woman, a sort of sibyl who negotiates
the inspirations. Their business affairs are
managed by thirteen trustees, chosen annually by the
male members, who also choose the president. They
are very religious, though having but little outward
form. There are fourteen hundred and fifty members,
who live in seven different towns or villages, which
are all known by the name of Amana—East
Amana, West Amana,
etc. They have their
property for the most part in common. Each family
has a house, to which food is daily distributed.
The work is done by a prudent division of labor, as
in the Icarian community. But instead of providing
clothing and incidentals, the community makes to each
person an allowance for this purpose—to
the men of from forty to one hundred dollars a year,
to the women from twenty-five to thirty dollars, and
to the children from five to ten dollars. There
are public stores in the community at which the members
can get all they need besides food, and at which also
strangers can deal. They dress very plainly,
use simple food, and are quite industrious. They
aim to keep the men and women apart as much as possible.
They sit apart at the tables and in church, and when
divine service is dismissed the men remain in their
ranks until the women get out of church and nearly
home. In their games and amusements they keep
apart, as well as in all combinations whether for
business or pleasure. The boys play with boys
and the girls with girls. They marry at twenty-four.
They own at present twenty-five thousand acres of
land, a considerable part of which is under cultivation.
They have, in round numbers, three thousand sheep,
fifteen hundred head of cattle, two hundred horses
and twenty-five hundred hogs. Besides farming,
they carry on two woollen-mills, four saw-mills, two
grist-mills and a tannery. They are almost entirely
self-supporting in the arts, working up their own
products and living off the result. In medicine
they are homoeopathists.
The “Rappists” or Harmony Society at Economy,
Pennsylvania, is composed of about one hundred members,
being all that remain of a colony of six hundred who
came from Germany in 1803. They were called Separatists
or “Come-outers” in their own country,
and much persecuted on account of their nonconformity
with the established Church. They landed in Baltimore,
and some of them who never found their way into the
community, or who subsequently withdrew, settled in
Maryland and Pennsylvania, where they are still known
as a religious sect. Those who remained together
purchased five thousand acres of land north of Pittsburg,
in the valley of the Conoquenessing. In 1814
they moved to Posey county, Indiana, in the Wabash
Valley, where they purchased thirty thousand acres
of land, and in 1824 they moved back again to their
present locality in Pennsylvania. In 1831 a dissension
arose among them, and a division was effected by one
Bernard Mueller—or “Count Maximilian”
as he called himself—who went off with
one-third of the members and a large share of the property,
and founded a new community at Phillips, ten miles
off, on eight hundred acres of land, which, however,
soon disbanded on account of internal quarrels.