The Frontier of Country and Culture, and What Became of It

In the United States, the expanding frontier initially was focused on the Upper South and Lower Midwest, specifically the Ohio River Valley. It had been the hunting grounds of many Native American tribes because of the lush forests and fields. This region centers on Kentucky, a major destination of early settlers, and it includes parts of what would become the immediately surrounding states. The main entry point was the Cumberland Gap. It opened up to the Boone Trace that was improved as the Wilderness Road. One section went down to Tennessee and the other, passing through Kentucky, ended at the Ohio River, right on the border with Indiana. There is a strong tie between the latter two states, sometimes referred to as Kentuckiana. Many frontiersmen and families, like that of Abraham Lincoln (and several lines of my own family), settled in Kentucky before moving onto Indiana. This is why Indiana is the most Southern of the Midwestern states.

[As a side note, it took a long time for the full heft of the American population explosion to push further to the West: “In 1890 the center of population of the United States was found to be in eastern Indiana. That mythical center has moved slowly across the state in succeeding decades, but is still within Hoosierdom” (Howard H. Peckham,” Indiana History: Excerpts from newspapers and other sources). For about a century, the Kentuckiana region was at the demographic, political, economic, and cultural center of American society; and so long captured the public imagination. Consider how symbolically important Kentucky was for the Union to protect during the American Civil War, to the point that they seized the most famous Kentucky race horse at the time.]

Heading inland from the East Coast, others would have traveled along the Ohio River. Combined with the land route, that is why so many communities formed and concentrated in central Kentucky, northern Kentucky, southern Ohio, and southern Indiana. Part of the attraction besides easier travel and available water sources was the Bluegrass region that was great land for grazing. Ironically, so-called Kentucky bluegrass originally came from Europe and was already spreading Westward by the 1600s. Immediately following the American Revolution, the new government opened the West, as it was the prior British imperial government that had kept settlers out of Native American territory. One of my first ancestors to the region came as an Indian fighter in 1795. By the early 1800s, Kentucky was mostly under control, if with occasional conflicts (e.g., 1813 Tecumseh’s War), and the next wave of settlements were already moving into Indiana, with its richer soil, that became a state in 1816.

But Kentucky retained prominence in the national mind and plenty of land was still open for the taking, useful for growing tobacco and hemp, at least until the soil was depleted and the import tariffs ended. For generations, it had been seen as the leading edge of Western civilization’s advance, the ‘Athens of the West’ (ed. by James C. Klotter & Daniel Bruce Rowland, Bluegrass Renaissance: The History and Culture of Central Kentucky, 1792–1852). Not only pioneers but farmers, industrialists, and others arrived with dreams and schemes of a better life. And with them came wealth, high culture, and intelligentsia. In the wake were built numerous cities, universities, hospitals, and much else. There was a sense of hope, optimism, and progress. And it spilled over into Southern Indiana. That was how generations of early Americans saw the future, through the lens of Kentuckiana culture, and it seemed like growth would never end, with a vast continent before them.

Today, that is not exactly how most think of Kentucky and Indiana. Instead, the association is to poverty, drug addiction, high rates of obesity and disease, dying rural communities, old mining towns, de-industrialized cities, low education, social conservatism, racial bigotry, regressive politics, isolationism, ethnonationalism, and MAGA. The population in Kentuckiana is often thought of in terms of ‘white trash’ or hillbillies. Indeed, as Indiana is known as the Hoosier state, one theory is that originally the word ‘Hoosier’ referred to poor whites living in the backwoods (Nancy Isenberg, White Trash). It was a slur that was embraced as a proud identity. This reputation has been well earned. There was a dark turn that came to define the area in the early 1900s, from the Night Riders of Kentucky to the Second Klan in Indiana. This period of vigilantism and terrorism sent many blacks fleeing for the big cities or else forced into segregation, while their property was stolen from them and entire towns were turned sundown. Even when changes were sweeping the country, Indiana was the last of the non-Confederate states to pass non-discriminatory language toward integrating its schools.

Still, as Kentuckiana has been my family’s ancestral homeland for more than a couple of centuries, I like to look back at what it had been for generations and what it once promised to be. Abraham Lincoln represents well that other side of the story. As a boy, his family moved around Kentuckiana, in the same areas as my own family. Particularly influential for him was his time in Southern Indiana where he got his first taste for reading and education. Also, while there, he experienced the extremes of the society he was born into. He watched slaves in chains pass by on a nearby road and he saw the “Boatload of Knowledge” (1826) heading to New Harmony, a nearby socialist commune that was founded (1824) by the Welshman Robert Owen who was a social reformer and secularist. On that barge was Owen’s son, the then young Robert Dale, who would later become friends with Lincoln and encouraged him, as president, to adopt abolition.

Lincoln’s boyhood home was about 40 miles east of New Harmony. And about equal distance north of him was a small village called Spring Mill, one of the nearest major grain mills and a stage coach stop. There wasn’t a lot in Southern Indiana at the time and so people in these separate places would’ve known about each other. For example, if one wasn’t traveling by river, another main option was to pass through Spring Mill. It also was a small center for shopping, business, and mail delivery. “Quite often, the intellectuals from Indiana’s famous experimental colony at New Harmony stopped at the tavern” (The Village That Slept Awhile, p. 7). The tavern was built in 1823, the year before Owen bought his new town from the previous German Harmonists. It was around the 1820s and the decades following that a Wesley Clouse, possibly in my lineage, was the distiller there. Later on, other members in my Clouse family (intermarried with the Hawk family) moved from Kentucky, living and working in Spring Mill for a few generations, the last generation born there as squatters in abandoned buildings.

It seems likely that my family, similar to that of the Lincolns, would’ve known about all the crazy socialists, intellectuals, and ne’er do well dreamers over in New Harmony. “By 1825 [Owen’s] name must have been familiar to almost any literate common citizen who had the slightest interest in current events — and who was not too weary from shooting varmints away from his door, if he happened to reside in the American backwoods, or praying that the fox-hunting gentry would miss trampling his crops if he lived in rural England, or working fourteen or so hours per day in the factories of either country… Robert Owen and the theories he expounded were always the object of violently dissenting opinions — but there can be no question as to the extent of his contemporary fame” (R. E. Banta, “Robert Owen,” Indiana History: Excerpts from newspapers and other sources). Such people were part of a public debate, local and national, about what kind of country America was to become; and no doubt most people had opinions on the matter, possibly with greater diversity of thought than we appreciate today.

Keep in mind that it wasn’t only Owen and associates, just a few leftist cranks off in the far corner of Indiana. Numerous intellectuals, scientists, writers, and artists were drawn to the West with the exciting allure of new communities and possibilities, discoveries and adventure; or simply to escape the problems and oppressiveness of the Old World, including many idealistic Forty-Eighters fleeing failed revolutions; and not to mention the promise of cheap land and the wealth of natural resources. In Spring Mill, a large forest was bought by the Scottish George Donaldson, an eccentric explorer, naturalist, and environmentalist. He wouldn’t let anyone use the forest for lumber or hunting, which is why it remains preserved to this day, along with a cave containing a rare blind cave fish. This was the inspiring intellectual milieu that shaped the young Lincoln, in spite of his own father’s anti-intellectual hatred of book learning (e.g., throwing his books into the fire). And this is how a poor boy raised in the backwoods could become educated, develop impressive rhetorical skills, get work as a lawyer, and aspire to the presidency.

Idealists and utopians, reformers and progressives were were fairly common in Kentuckiana, and often quite egalitarian for their time such as the Shakers led by the most powerful woman in the country at the time. Some were religious like the Quakers, Shakers, and the original Rappite Harmonists who were Pietists. While others were socialist and secularist like the New Harmonists. But they were all inspired by a shared faith in humanity or the divine within humanity, along with visions that different ways of living and relating were possible. Those like the Shakers built long-lasting, successful, and innovative communes; and so had much influence on American agricultural practices. These communities and groups of people gained some combination of notoriety and respect by their neighbors, but for certain they weren’t ignored in how they left a mark on the society around them. Their impact contributed to Indiana eventually becoming a center of scientific reforms in agriculture, along with a state college like Purdue becoming a force in engineering.

Many of these groups helped promote education for all children, including the poor, ethnic immigrants, and blacks; and the 1816 state constitution guaranteed funding for county public libraries. Maybe that is what gave such a literary bent to early Indiana. “Yet it is not simply that so many Hoosiers wrote that gave the state its reputation; it is the indisputable fact that a score of those writers produced one bestseller after another which compelled national attention to Indiana” (Howard H. Peckham, “Indiana’s Big Four: James Whitcomb Riley, George Ade, Meredith Nicholson, Booth Tarkington; What Made Hoosiers Write?,” Indiana History: Excerpts from newspapers and other sources). So, it went beyond merely that the literate and educated moved to Indiana for the following generations were shaped by that influence and carried it forward.

A literary culture developed, not only among the elite but as a widespread popular pasttime. Literary clubs and publications popped up in towns all over the state, along with thespian societies, various social and cultural groups, and such. “All of these organizations,” Pekcham wrote, “were forums where members were obliged to offer papers.” Making this point is an anecdote that might be part folklore but, according to the author, was repeated often because it represented the social reality of the times: “WHEN THAT PERENNIAL CHAUTAUQUA lecturer, the late Opie Read, first appeared in Fort Wayne, he announced that he was aware of Indiana’s literary reputation and therefore if there was an author in the audience would he please stand? Whereupon the audience rose en masse. Mr. Read recovered himself in time to notice one old man still seated and called attention to him as one Hoosier who was not an author. “Oh, no, he writes, too,’’ someone said. “He’s just deef and didn’t hear your question.””

There was a larger social amd political component as well. The sons of Robert Owen entered fields of science, education, and politics. Besides promoting such things as socialism and abolitionism, they were involved in other areas of what was and still is far left politics: women’s rights, prison reform, public hygiene, free public education, environmentailsm, conservation, national museums, activist government, etc. Their influence went beyond Indiana to the national level, helping to shape the country we now live in, such as the development of land grant colleges, the Smithsonian Institute, and the United States Geological Survey. And the Owen family was far from alone. Eugene V. Debs was born and raised in Southern Indiana, in the same town of Terra Haute where some of my family hailed from. He would become the most famous and influential socialist in American history, once vying for the presidency from a prison cell. If further north, another Hoosier boy was the popular novelist Kurt Vonnegut who had his own inclinations toward radicalism, if not as overtly political.

Going from the 1800s to the early 1900s, there held a strong progressive spirit in Indiana. Along with other Midwestern states like Wisconsin, it was a bulwark of early Progressivism before it fully became national politics through the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. What changed to cause such cultural decline later in the 20th century? It’s not like Indiana disappeared from the face of the earth. It still has a large population, with a significant industrial and agricultural economy, and the state colleges are fine institutions. Besides what was already mentioned (e.g., vigilante terrorism), maybe a larger culprit was the ensuing neoliberalism and the big biz takeover of the economy. Sadly, another Hoosier figure, Purdue’s Earl Butz, came to work for President Richard Nixon as the Secretary of Agriculture. He used the power of national policy to destroy small family farms and privilege big ag. As he put it, “Get big or get out.”

Combined with deindustrializtion and offshoring, it wiped out the local economies in nearly every small town across the state, as it did elsewhere. A similar thing happened in Kentucky with coal mining taken over by mechanized extraction, leaving behind an unemployed and impoverished population. For some reason, social Darwinian capitalism seems to have particularly hit hard the Kentuckiana region. The loss of work wasn’t compensated for by other areas of growing industry, as happened in some farm states like Iowa that have held onto more stable economies. Part of this might seem inevitable, in retrospect. At the turn of the 20th century, Indiana had a gas boom and with it came boom towns, which tend not to last. Because of the cheap gas, a massive number of factories were built. In my father’s hometown of Alexandria, a few thousand residents were employed in a handful of factories in town and some nearby larger factories. It was a prosperous and thriving place, an island of industry surrounded by lush farmland. During World War II, a propaganda campaign used Alexandria as the ideal of “Small Town, USA.”

Obviously, even after the gas dried up by the 1920s, the economy kept trucking along. The energy grid, over time, became less dependent on local sources of fuel. Into the post-war period, Alexandria was a Democratic stronghold and, as with the rest of the country, the factory-employed population became highly unionized. They didn’t think of themselves as living in a temporary boom town. But with changes in government policies and corporate practices, the working class was losing its bargaining power and political leverage. After a period of strikes, some factories closed or moved elsewhere, often overseas. It was impossible for workers in Alexandria to compete against slave labor in China or wherever else. They never had a fighting chance. And once the factories and small farms were gone, economic desperation set in, with an resulting cultural malaise and cynicism. The downtown died and town pride disappeared. My uncle tried to slow the tide of decline, such as maintaining the downtown with a tree-lined boulevard, but the population no longer cared and willfully let the town fall apart (e.g., cutting the trees down seemingly in spite or else resignation). Apparently, a collective depressive state of learned helplessness and self-destructiveness became the new culture. And unsurprisingly, over the years, many buildings and houses mysteriously burned down, possibly from arsonists or meth production.

For a generation following, there was still some money around because the retired factory workers had pensions, but over time that lingering source of wealth has dried up. And during the 1980s, the despair and suicidality of small farmers in the area took the wind out of the culture. Now it’s become swept up into Donald Trump’s MAGA mania. There is a nostalgia for a past that is so long gone that almost no one remembers what it used to be like. The radicalism and progressivism of a bygone era has fallen prey to collective amnesia and historical revisionism. Instead of being part of a vision of the future, Kentuckiana and the Ohio Valley was ground zero of economic annihilation. What is left behind in the wreckage is bitterness and bigotry; the typical socio-political conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social domination orientation (SDO), and Double Highs (RWA+SDO) that always arises out of poverty, inequality, sickness, and shit life syndrome (see: behavioral immune system, parasite-stress theory, regality theory, disgust response, threat reaction, sickness behavior, & conservation-withdrawal). It’s now hard to imagine anyone ever thought such places could be centers of culture, learning, and literacy buoyed up by optimism and pride. The frontier of progress is long gone.

* * * * *

7/6/2024: After writing the above, I did some further research (see two passages below). It turns out that there was much influence between the Owenites and Shakers, going in both directions, sometimes friendly but more often contentious. This involved New Harmony and the nearby Shaker villages in Kentucky and Indiana, but also connecting back to the East Coast. In Kentuckiana, during this same period of the 19th century, there were also Catholic monasteries, a different kind of idealistic communitarian living and often involving communal work. Thomas Merton, as a monk in Kentucky, had particular interest in the Shakers and liked to visit Pleasant Hill. He wrote about them in relation to his own monastic experience. Such communitarian ideas and practices form a core to the larger Christian tradition, if they’ve become forgotten by most since. This is one of the many ways that modern fundamentalism is the complete opposite of traditional religiosity. The Shakers were among the last outpourings of an ancient way of being, although isolated examples like the communal Hutterites can be found.

As a Quaker splinter group, the Shakers were a product of the English Civil War. That brings up centuries of religious dissent and egalitarian radicalism. The Catholic tradition, of course, resisted such changes; or rather suppressed the recurring charismatic sects and ecstatic practices. All these groups were similarly influenced by the communal living among the earliest Christians that challenged the dominant social order back then and still does today. There is also something about the communal identity, specifically by way of ecstatic dancing, stomping, and music but also other kinds of inspired movements and activities. That is why the Quakers came to be called as such, as they used to powerfully quake and tremble when they felt the divine speaking or moving through them. This behavior began to wane by the end of the 1600s and it stopped entirely by the 1740s. All that was left was the practice of sitting silently listening for God, which is what Quakers are known for today, but the second part of worship was extinguished.

The Quakers having softened their radical edge by the 1700s might’ve contributed to the Shakers founding their own group in 1747. Essentially, Shakerism was a feudal village and parish transformed by modernity, whereas Quakers took on more conventional norms over time. It’s to be expected that other aspects of feudalism also survived among Shakers but not Quakers, such as the Medieval dancing manias. Into recent times, the Shakers were still known for raucous worship and falling into ‘violent’ convulsions. Over their history, they went back and forth between ecstatitic dancing and formalistic dancing, as they understood revelatory experience was ongoing and not a one time event while also seeking to maintain a shared identity. If religious practice became too controlled and ritualistic, the direct connection to God would be lost. This used to be part of Catholicism as well, into the Middle Ages. For more than a millennia, churches did not have pews but were open spaces where congregants milled about and danced. Religious experience was a dynamic, interactive, and expressive.

That is what defined Christianity for most of its history, from the ancient world to medieval times. It’s probably no accident that this having changed coincided with self-controlled individualism having become the dominant ideology in society with the rise of the market economy and industrialized capitalism. Losing oneself in shared spiritual experience, once the defining feature of Christianity, became frowned upon and perceived as dangerous. Communal religious identities and movements, like the Quakers, had become so powerful that it incited multiple uprisings, from the 14th century English Peasants’ Revolt to the 17th century English Civil War. That led to a counterrevolutionary backlash by way of the elite having dismanteld the feudal order, starting with the Enclosure Movement that privatized the commons, walled in land, destroyed rural villages, and created a landless peasantry forced into the cities. There was mass homeless, poverty, stavation, and disease. What ensued was food riots and labor organizing, with many people dying, being publicly executed, imprisoned, sent to prison colonies, put into workhouses, or made into indentured servants. To finalize the destruction of the Ancien Regime, there was a land reform movement that straigthened boundaries, roads, and waterways; while cutting down the last of the wilderness and walling it all in. No space was to be left remaining for a common identity.

It was an intentional and systematic action of the ruling elites through government policies (Enclosure of the Mind). Modern individualism and the propertied self didn’t form naturally and peacefully. Nor did it happen quickly. Throughout the 19th century, there was lingering outrage and violent protest about the loss of the commons that were still in the process of being eliminated: “More spectacularly, enclosure and enclosure riots are usually seen as a thing of the period between the 1790s and 1830s. Indeed the ‘general enclosure’ of 1845 is supposed to have put an end to such disturbances. This is simply not the case. The reports of the enclosure Commissioners of 1868–9 show that in the previous years there had been widespread opposition to enclosure which had often taken violent and ‘traditional’ forms” (p.117, Alun Howkins, Reshaping Rural England: A Social History, 1850–1925). Even at that late of a date, one critic worried that it “will take generations to eradicate.” These peasants still demanding their rights to the commons would be the same kind of person attracted to the Shaker way of life during its heyday.

The last English traces of feudalism (legal carryovers from the Charter of the Forest) wouldn’t be fully eradicated until the 1980s takeover of Thatcherite neoliberalism (i.e., ‘conservatism’). But the primal impulse within humanity lives on. Every populist protest movement is a recognition, if unconscious and distorted, that something of value was lost. That is the point we’ve made about leftist politics. There is an ancient memory based on the bundle theory of mind, long preceding the ego theory of mind that we are more familiar with today. That ancient memory is more strongly felt on the modern left than on the modern right, as the modern right in its nostalgia and historical revisionism seeks to replace it entirely. This is what made the Owenite socialists a direct competition with the Shakers, as they were both drawing on the same hidden current of communal culture. And that shared influence, with its profound egalitarianism, has its roots in the first generation Christians (Galatians 3:28; Stephen J. Patterson, The Forgotten Creed: Christianity’s Original Struggle Against Bigotry, Slavery, and Sexism). That was the result of a larger transformation of humanity that happened during the Axial Age when egalitarian ideals first were articulated.

Richard McNemar: Frontier Heretic and Shaker Apostle
by Christian Goodwillie

“The philosophy of Robert Owen and his New Harmony community formed a backdrop to this unrest. Shortly before Darrow’s death, the Union Village Ministry, possibly still with Darrow’s input, remarked in a letter to the New Lebanon Ministry that they knew of Owen, writing, “We understand that a good many people are pleased with his Cystem, others seam rather disposed to pick it to pieces.” Seven months later, on Decembrer 30, 1825, Robert Owen visited Union Village. The Welsh social reforemr’s teachings and reputation preceded him. His landmark tract A New View of Society (1813) elaborated on the system he put into practice at his textile mill in New Lanark, Scotland. Owen believed that inculcating children with carefully managed physical, moral, and social influences would result in gradual social reform, ultimately bringing about a “New Moral World.” This, combined with his ideas on labor and the treatment of the working class in a rapidly industrializing world, made his ideas very attractive to reformers on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, Owen conceived of a model for a communitarian system that he hoped to implement in North America. In October 1824, he arrived in the United States with his son William, and the next January he purchased the Harmonist settlement at New Harmony, Indiana, from Father George Rapp and his followers. The Shaker settlement at West Union was only ninety miles up the Wabash River, and the Shakers had already visited New Harmony many times during the Harmonists’ tenure. The press publicized Owen’s communal venture far and wide, and his ideas permeated Shaker communities in a way that David Darrow would surely have disapproved of.

“One Owenite follower, John Whitbey, set in motion a series of events at Pleasant Hill that spawned years of trouble for the community. … In exploring these impulses, Whitbey happened on Owen’s New View of Society. The new elders of the Gathering Order, James Rankin and George Runyon, appointed in 1825, tried hard to suppress Whitbey’s influence in spreading his excitement over Owen’s philosophy, even going so far as to forbid family members from the reading The New Harmony Gazette. … “The influence of Owen’s ideas, in combination with preexisting factional strive, affected nearly every member of the society, leaving them “contaminated, or as they now call it, ‘smoak’d.’” … Whitbey wrote a letter to Robert Owen requesting further information, for he “had long entertained a desire to see what could be done on the free principles of reason, unfettered by tradition and superstition.” … John Whitbey and his brother Richardson left Pleasant HIll on NOvember 21, 1825, traveling to New Harmony. … Whitbey’s Beauties of Priestcraft was published at New Harmony in 1826. It’s effects reverberated throughout the Ohio Valley, especially among those who apostatized following the disollution of West Union. A web of anti-Shaker correspondents comprising those who had left Pleasant Hill, as well as some disgruntled members still at Pleasant Hill and South Union, and ex-Shakers still squatting at the former community of West Union, agitated community life further.”

“Trans-Atlantic Reputations: Protestant Communalism and Early Socialism”
by Philip Lockley
Protestant Communalism in the Trans-Atlantic World: 1650–1850
ed. by Philip Lockley

“Owen’s leadership at New Harmony offered a sufficiently alternative prospect to disrupt at least one Shaker community. Yet, this difference was ultimately not great enough to prevent the experience of failure in Owen-inspired communities, or the disillusionment of their demise, to lead a notable number of former Owenites — including British migrants to America — to consider new lives as Shakers.

“The Shaker community at Pleasant Hill in Kentucky was the most affected by events at New Harmony in the mid-1820s. Situated close to one of the common routes west, several young men in the community learned of Owen during the course of 1825. The leader of the group, John Whitby, pressed for Pleasant Hill’s communal structures to be reformed, to introduce a democratic element to the election of Shaker leaders and a rearrangement of the Shaker community’s assets along lines closer to Oqen’s theories. When forced out of the community, Whitby and his brother Richardson made their way to New Harmony, where John published an anti-Shaker tract in 1826. The Whitbys joined at least one other former Shaker already at New harmony: William Ludlow, once a resident of New Lebanon in New York.

“New Lebanon would, in time, become the Shaker community of choice for ex-Owenites, beginning with a substantial group from the Valley Forge community, west of Philadelphia. Valley Forge was one of the numerous communities established on Owen’s principles independently from New Harmony. It formed and disbanded within the course of 1826 under the leadership of Abel Knight, a Quaker whose Philadelphia home was remembered as a headquarters for Owen’s early disciples in the city. In May 1827, ‘a party of seven’ from Valley Forge made their way to New Lebanon ’desiring to see the Shakers and learn form them the secret of successful communism’. The visitors stayed for a period ‘to observe the workings of the community’, then returned to Philadelphia. Shaker missionaries were then sent south to follow up the interest, and by 1828 about fifty former members of Valley Forge had joined, and returned with them to the Hudson Valley. Among them were Abel Knight and his daughters Jane and Sarah, and George Wickersham — who alleged to have first ‘heard the name Shaker mentioned’ in a lecture given by Robert Owen in Philadelphia.

“After 1830, two further British-born Owenites joined New Lebanon: Frederick Evans and Daniel Fraser. Evans was originally from Worcestershire, and migrated to America aged 12 with his fther and brother George Henry in 1820. By 1825, both Evans brothers ‘were radicals in civil government, and in religion … materialists’, and in the late 1820s were closely involved in the Owen-inspired freethought movement in New York City, including its journal the Working Man’s Advocate. In 1829, Frederick Evans walked to Ohio to join the Kendall community, one of the longer-lasting Owenite experiments, though the witnessed itts disintegration soon after his arrival. Returning to New York, Evans joined another group planning a community, and was ‘deputed to travel for information, and to find a suitable location’. In the course of his researches, Evans called at New Lebanon ‘interested … in the community system and its operation as it existed there’, but during his stay underwent a dramatic spiritual experience whi hled him to convert to Shakerism. Evans went on to become the most prominent Shaker of his generation.

“In contrast to Evans, Daniel Fraser’s Owenite sympathies were bred first in Britain — in Yorkshire and London, though he was originally from Paisley, west fo Glasgow. Living nearHuddersfield from the late 1820s, Fraser was drawn intovarious radical causes, including reform of factory conditions. On a visit to London, Fraser met Robert Owen, now returned from America, and became ‘imbued with the sentiments of his communal ideas’. In 1834, Fraser ‘left England for America, resolved … to be instrumental in forming a community’, being ‘fully satisfied that our civilization needed a higher form of economic, and … social life’. Fraser’s plans for an Owenite community crumbled on arrival, but he visited New Lebanon, whee he met Frederick Evans and ‘an orgganization already fulfilling his ideal’, and never left.”