508 INDIANA HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS 



I could not meet with a boat, and had to pursue my way 

 down by stage over very bad roads, made so by the floods 

 of rain. I continued to find the condition of the wheat as 

 I described it in my last. Finding so little wheat in sack, 

 led to inquiry and information that it is preferred to let 

 it remain in the shock until it can be threshed, on ac- 

 count of the wevil, which are a very great pest here- 

 abouts. After threshing, the grain is carefully screened 

 before putting away, and that does not always save it. 

 I am told that mixing a little powdered lime with it is a 

 preventive. 



At Graysville, 111., about a dozen miles from New Har- 

 mony, whither I was bound, I came to a dead halt. The 

 great flood of White River had overflowed the Wabash 

 bottom, so as greatly to injure crops and entirely stop 

 traveling; what was very provoking, I arrived fifteen 

 minutes too late for a steamer, and no other one above. 

 Here was a quandary — or a waterdary. But fortune 

 smiled upon me in the shape of a downward-bound canoe, 

 into which I stowed my trunk and seated myself upon it, 

 and took to the current in a sun not quite hot enough 

 to melt iron. 



New Harmony has been one of the most celebrated 

 towns in the State of Indiana. It was first settled by 

 "Rapp's 1 community," in 1814, and during the ten years 

 that they remained here they performed wonders. Firstly, 

 they had to erect temporary dwellings, clear and fence 

 the lands, build mills, cotton gins and factory, for they 

 raised cotton, and also wine. They also erected a very 

 good frame church. But soon the spirit of permanent 

 improvement began to develop itself in brick dwellings, 



1 George Rapp, born November 1, 1757, in Wurtemburg, Ger- 

 many; died August 7, 1847. Immigrated to America in 1803 and 

 founded a colony in Butler County, Pennsylvania. Organized the 

 Harmony Society, a communistic theocracy. The colony moved to 

 the Wabash Valley, now the site of New Harmony, Indiana, in 

 1814. In 1824 they sold their lands to Robert Owen and returned 

 to Pennsylvania where they established a settlement called Econ- 

 omy. See sketch in Dictionary of American Biography, 15:383-84. 



