Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 307 pages of information about Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118.

Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 307 pages of information about Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118.
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.

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Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.