New Harmony is the New Mexico site of a communal experiment founded in 1868 by Priscilla Penn Cropper and a group of reformers. The settlement’s failure exposed the practical limits of their ideal of free passion and collective life; the family home that followed translated that ideal into a more bounded vision of domestic happiness.

Founding and Ideal

Priscilla Penn Cropper, a forceful Maine-born advocate for women’s emancipation, had gathered around her people drawn to new social ideas and experimental ways of living. Her future husband, Sharman M. Cropper, joined her following after seeing her speak outdoors about Fourierist principles, Harmony, and the pursuit of free passion and pleasure. In 1868, the group travelled to New Mexico to attempt to establish a phalanstery, a communal settlement intended to embody those principles.

The venture belonged to a broader tradition of planned communities associated with Robert Owen and his son Robert Dale Owen. Some of its participants had previously belonged to splinter groups formed around model communities and rectangular villages. New Harmony’s ambitions were therefore both specific to Priscilla’s circle and part of a larger effort to turn social theory into an organized way of life.

Why the Settlement Failed

The plan depended on reaching a population of 1,620, a number intended to represent all possible variations of passion among men and women. That exacting condition was never met. The group also lacked the practical knowledge its chosen environment demanded: no one among the enthusiasts was skilled in agriculture or understood desert conditions. New Harmony failed through a collision between an elaborate social design and the material requirements of survival in New Mexico.

The novel presents that collapse without reducing it to a single cause. The missing population and the settlers’ lack of farming expertise made the project unworkable, while Priscilla’s later reflection on the experiment recognizes both a hostile world and the reformers’ own insufficient resourcefulness and strength of mind. The utopian undertaking was vulnerable not only to external circumstances but to the difficulty of sustaining its ideals in daily life.

From Collective Experiment to Family Home

Sharman M. Cropper proposed a different answer to the loss of the communal project. A Southern gentleman whose family had lost a Mississippi mansion during the Civil War, he sought to rebuild the paradise of his youth according to what he called the rational and harmonious principles of Priscilla’s way of life. Instead of pursuing the group-love that had proved divisive and unmanageable, the couple would ground happiness in family life, with servants but without slavery.

Money from Priscilla’s patent medicine, Regenerating Powders, financed the house associated with this new arrangement. The shift was consequential: the public, collective experiment gave way to a private household, preserving the language of harmony while abandoning the settlement’s demand for an all-encompassing communal structure. New Harmony thus forms the failed precursor to a domestic alternative rather than the place where the Cropper family’s lasting home was built.

Memory and Historical Significance

Priscilla’s later account of the experiment treats its failure as a warning as well as a disappointment. She describes the hope that independent people could live usefully and fully in one another’s company, without reliance on men or the outside world, and regrets that the attempt did not succeed. Yet the work left behind might, she hoped, encourage stronger spirits to try again. Her assessment holds aspiration and self-criticism together: the world was fiercely inimical to the experiment, but its participants were also not always resourceful or strong-minded enough to withstand it.

The settlement’s history also gives the family narrative a material and political context. A project shaped by Fourierist ideas of social and sexual freedom ends in a household model that retains servants and family hierarchy, though explicitly rejects slavery. New Harmony’s significance lies in that contrast: it marks both the reach of nineteenth-century communal reform and the retreat from collective freedom into a more conventional, privately financed domestic order.