Voices from New Harmony: The Letters of Hannah Fisher Price and Helen Gregoroffsky Fisher

THE STORY of the American Owenite communities is an ambiguous one, as related by its participants in their letters "home" to family and loved ones.Many of the letter writers were initially taken with Robert Owen's "system" to change the old immoral world into a new, moral one but were soon discouraged with the realities of community life.The vitriolic essay of Paul Brown and the critical letters of William Maclure illustrate how reform-minded men lost their faith in Robert Owen's Utopian schemes to change the world.Perhaps the dedicated Philip Price, a member of the New Harmony Community from Philadelphia, best expresses the optimistic hopes and the dashed expectations of Owenite followers as he leaves the New Harmony area in August of 1826:Here we bade adieu, probably forever, to the beautiful and fertile [land], and at the same time to the splendid dreams of terrestrial happiness and human perfection which had been almost as the light of my soul, as the pole star of my existence, for so many months previous.It is needless now to recount the causes by which this bitter disappointment was occasioned.It is sufficient to say that we were sadly retracing the same road which but a year previously we had traveled with hopes so elate [d] and impatience so ardent to be actively engaged in those schemes that were to remodel the fact of creation. 1