Old Economy Village, a National Historic Landmark, tells the story of the Harmony Society, one of the oldest and most successful religious communal groups of the nineteenth century. The Society sought to create a utopia inhabited by German Lutheran separatists who subscribed to the mystical religious teachings of their leader George Rapp (1757-1847). In Economy, they waited for the second coming of the Messiah.
Economy was the third and final home of the Harmony Society. In 1824, leaders purchased 3,000 acres in Beaver County on the Ohio River, eighteen miles downriver from Pittsburgh. The soil was rich for farming and the location was ideal for shipping Society products to markets on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and to the West in the newly settled areas on the frontier.
The Society’s financial success and self-sufficiency stirred the interest of economists and social reformers in the United States and Europe. Following an uprising and departure of disgruntled members in 1832 and the death of Frederick Rapp in 1834, the Society became less open to the outside world and less active in the political arena. The Society’s substantial assets were invested in the country’s coal, oil and railroad industries. In 1885, the leadership determined that if the Messiah should not return before the last member died, the Society’s assets were to go to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and be used for charitable purposes or to pay the state’s sizeable debt.
Less than ten years after 1892, the Society’s remaining assets , estimated to be worth several million dollars, were engulfed in legal battles. These battles were between non-member relatives of Society members who had already successfully argued in court that the Society was not a charity and, therefore the Commonwealth was not entitled to receive its assets. Ultimately, however, the remaining six acres of Economy and associated buildings became the property of Pennsylvania in 1916, and in 1919 became Old Economy Village, a state historic site.
Old Economy is run through a partnership between the Pennsylvania Historical Museum Commission (PHMC) and the Friends of Old Economy Village (FOEV).