George Rapp came to the United States from Germany, in 1803, in search of a more tolerant home for the sect which he had founded. He purchased a tract of land in Butler County, Pennsylvania, and during the summer of 1804 six hundred of his followers, chiefly mechanics and laborers, joined him, and in the following year the community known as the Harmony Society was formally organized. The members were banded together in a Christian brotherhood, and were orthodox in all essentials. Property was held in common, and thought was directed away from mundane affairs to the second coming of the Lord, which Rapp believed to be imminent. The members experienced, in 1807, a great spiritual awakening, and one of its results was their acceptance of celibacy as an implied if not obligatory tenet of the sect. In 1814, the community sold the greater part of its holdings of real estate in Pennsylvania and purchased 30,000 acres of land in Indiana, of which Harmony became the centre. The following year the Rappites moved to the lower Wabash and continued in a new wilderness their severe labors and ascetic practices. They marked out a village in squares, with broad streets, and built houses in which beauty was sacrificed to stability. It is a tribute to their excellent workmanship that many of these structures are still in use, having survived two communistic experiments and falling at last to the incidental needs of a Western village. The Rappites had been annoyed during their sojourn in Pennsylvania by unsympathetic neighbors, and fearing similar experiences with the rough characters that roamed the Wabash country in those days, they deemed it wise to prepare a defence. They thereupon built, of brick and stone, a substantial fortress which was used as a granary. The walls were three feet thick and the loopholes were barred. The story that this building was connected with Rapp’s house by an underground passage is authoritatively denied at New Harmony.