The Communistic Societies of the United States - From Personal Visit and Observation by Charles Nordhoff
page 74 of 496 (14%)
page 74 of 496 (14%)
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region." I must add my own testimony that the Harmonists now living are
almost without exception stout, well-built, hearty people, the women as well as the men. At the same time that the celibate life was adopted, the community agreed to cease using tobacco in every form--a deprivation which these Germans must have felt almost as severely as the abandonment of conjugal joys. The site of the Pennsylvania settlement proved to have been badly chosen in two respects. It had no water communication with the outer world; and it was unfavorable to the growth of the vine. In 1814, after proper discussion, the society determined to seek a more desirable spot; and purchased thirty thousand acres of land in Posey County, Indiana, in the Wabash valley. Thither one hundred persons proceeded in June 1814, to prepare a place for the remainder; and by the summer of 1815 the whole colony was in its new home, having sold six thousand acres of land, with all their valuable improvements, in their old home, for one hundred thousand dollars. The price they received is said to have been, and no doubt was, very much below the real value of the property. It is impossible to sell off a large and expensively improved estate like theirs all at once. It is probably true that the machinery and buildings were worth all they received for the whole property; and it would not be an overestimate to give the real value of what they sold at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They had begun, ten years before, with one hundred and twenty-five families; as after the second year they had bred no children, and as they then lost some members who left on account of their aversion to a celibate life, it is probable that they had not |
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