GEORGE RAPP, ECONOMY AND THE NEW MILLENNIUM

St John’s Lutheran Church occupies the old Economy Harmonist chapel in Ambridge, Pennsylvania today. Notice only the hour hand is shown.

In the last post, we saw Johan Georg Rapp and 600 like-minded Pietists coming from Germany to establish a new communal settlement just north of the Ohio River called Harmonie. After a decade, they set out downriver to build a New Harmony along the banks of the Wabash River in southern Indiana. Another decade brought Rapp and his followers back upriver to found their last town, Oikonomie, better known as Economy. Here, Rapp would continue to change the focus of simple agricultural communalism to more of a spirit of amassing wealth – still within a communal picture. This would allow Rapp and the Harmony Society to greet Jesus’ return at the beginning of the Second Coming with enough material sustenance to last the thousand years of the new Millennium.

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