The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible

by Simon Winchester

Eighteenth-century geology, infant science though it still may have been, offered the keys to unlock the country’s promise, bringing men out to inhabit the farther reaches of this country and create their nation. And the town of New Harmony, Indiana, was where this realization of geology’s importance was born. The town, first simply named Harmonie, was settled initially by early-nineteenth-century Germans, men and women fleeing to America much as the Pilgrim Fathers had fled two centuries before, to escape religious restrictions back home. Their piety and hard work paid off quickly, and they eventually moved on to larger quarters, selling their tiny settlement to another idealist adventurer, the campaigning Welsh socialist Robert Owen. He, flushed with the success of a millworkers’ commune that he had organized outside Edinburgh, planned to establish a utopian beachhead in America, based on socialist ideals. He renamed the former German village New Harmony; and once he had settled during the winter of 1825, he invited like-minded idealists to join him. Such was the educational reputation of Owen’s earlier Scottish experiment that New Harmony became an immediate magnet for intellectuals, philosophers, teachers—and, in particular, scientists. Geologists, most notably, pitched in with a special enthusiasm, such that at the peak of New Harmony’s fortunes, no fewer than seven geologists of considerable later distinction could be counted among the inhabitants. This tiny town bri...