ABSTRACT
[Formed in Monroe County, Indiana, the Blue Spring Community (1825–1826) was one of many short-lived attempts to bring Robert Owen’s vision to life in the New World between 1824 and 1828.1 The community’s constitution was signed between April and May 1826 by a group of nineteen men and eight women, thus indicating a continuous influx of new members over that short period. Though Blue Spring took direct inspiration from New Harmony, its sociological profile was very different, as it was not founded by a group of well-to-do reformers and intellectuals, but by an extended family of modest settlers who had recently moved to Indiana from the East Coast. Very little is known about the residents, including why and how they came to embrace Owen’s system in the first place. The Constitution is certainly indebted to mainstream Owenite principles, such as the superiority of co-operation and community life over pervading individualism in the modern age. However, the document also casts light on how the “new views” were accepted and adapted as potential solutions to the trials of life on the American frontier. Yet these very conditions proved to cause Blue Spring’s undoing. Faced with chronic shortage of capital, as well as with a lack of farming skills and local amenities, the community disbanded sometime in 1826 (Harrison 1969, 224; Bakken 2011).]
