New Harmony, Indiana: Like a River, Not a Lake: A Memoir
400
New Harmony, Indiana: Like a River, Not a Lake: A Memoir
400eBook
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Overview
For nearly seven decades, Jane Blaffer Owen was the driving force behind the restoration and revitalization of the town of New Harmony, Indiana. In this delightful memoir, Blaffer Owen describes the transformational effect the town had on her life. An oil heiress from Houston, she met and married Kenneth Dale Owen, great-great-grandson of Robert Owen, founder of a communal society in New Harmony. When she visited the then dilapidated town with her husband in 1941, it was love at first sight, and the story of her life and the life of the town became intertwined. Her engaging account of her journey to renew the town provides glimpses into New Harmony's past and all of its citizens—scientists, educators, and naturalists—whose influence spread far beyond the town limits. And there are fascinating stories of the artists, architects, and theologians who became part of Blaffer Owen's life at New Harmony, where, she says, "My roots could sink deeply and spread."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253016638 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/16/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Jane Blaffer Owen (1915–2010) was a Houston oil heiress who grew up traveling the globe. A sophisticate who studied at Bryn Mawr, the Washington School of Diplomacy, the Kinkaid School, and the Ethel Walker School, she has also received accolades and honorary degrees from many universities. She was recipient of the Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) and of the State of Indiana's Sachem Award for her lifelong dedication to enhancing the landmark historic community of New Harmony. In 2008, the National Trust for Historic Preservation recognized her accomplishments in New Harmony with its highest honor, the Louise DuPont Crowninshield Award.
Read an Excerpt
New Harmony Indiana
Like a River Not a Lake ? A Memoir
By Jane Blaffer Owen, Nancy Mangum McCaslin
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 The Jane Blaffer Owen Management TrustAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01663-8
CHAPTER 1
Twin Vows
I grew up in a small, exclusive neighborhood of impressive homes with magnolia-, jasmine-, and rose-filled gardens. The several families who had built these fine homes and gardens owned stock in the same companies, belonged to the same clubs, sent their children to the same schools, and attended the same church (institutions that were segregated in those days). The presumption that long and enduring friendships would blossom among the beneficiaries of this elite segment of society was in my case never justified.
In the decades between two world wars, children—especially young women—seldom disappointed parental expectations, however often they might have wished to bolt imposed boundaries. My long-suppressed rebellious spirit came close to volcanic eruption in Houston during 1936, my first year after college. Well-intentioned and loyal friends of my parents gave endless lunches, dinners, and dances, for I was considered a proper debutante in my Parisian haute couture wardrobe. Not so. I had done nothing to merit the attention of kind hosts. I saw myself as a wild, alien creature who had been forcefully herded down from her native habitat into a glittering show ring and ordered to go through prescribed paces. I searched in vain for some loose planks in my imaginary enclosure but found none.
Nor was there an acceptable exit from societal expectations after my engagement to Kenneth Dale Owen, the estimable man who would be my husband for sixty-one years. My future role as an active member of Houston society and a promoter of good causes cast its long shadow before me. My family background and education together with Kenneth's own impeccable credentials would place me in a position of leadership in the energy and oil capital of the world. Would I take a bold leap over my enclosure, embarrass the people I loved, break my legs, and smash my foolish face in the doing? Happily, and I believe by the grace of God, I didn't have to kick over the traces.
A way out of confining expectations presented itself shortly after my marriage in July 1941 and opened the way for a second marriage. From my perspective today, I firmly believe that every first marriage can be preserved if a cerebral and spiritual marriage follows. The rumblings of discontent in our hearts can lead either to strained relationships and divorces or to life-enhancing breakthroughs. It is unwise to expect happiness solely from another person. Other women have saved their marriages by taking a law degree, answering a call to the ministry, or cultivating an undeveloped talent. Had anyone predicted that a sleepy, dusty little Indiana town would be my threshold to a higher consciousness, I would not have believed it. But something did happen in that unlikely place to redirect my life.
* * *
That something began with a stopover in New Harmony one hot August day in 1941, three weeks after our wedding at Ste. Anne, my family's summer place in Ontario. As we were driving from Canada to Texas, Kenneth wanted me to see the town of his birth before pushing on to Houston. I had, of course, consented but not with enthusiasm. I had heard about my husband's illustrious ancestors and had read Frank Podmore's life of Robert Owen with my father before I met Kenneth. Daddy admired Owen for his factory and child labor reforms and initiated similar social benefits and an employee stock ownership plan for the Humble Oil Company that he helped found. For me, the legacy of Robert Owen and his fellow passengers on "The Boatload of Knowledge" existed chiefly in history books and biographies.
Our car pulled up before an unusual house known as the David Dale Owen Laboratory, which I soon learned had been built in 1859 (4 on town map on back endpaper). David Dale Owen was a geologist. David's elder brother Robert Dale, who was an early trustee of the Smithsonian, had chosen James Renwick Jr. as the architect for that institution, America's first castle of science and first national museum.
David Dale had worked and taught in three laboratories before building this one: the Harmonist Community House No. 3 and the Harmonist shoe factory (both long gone from town), followed by seventeen years in the Harmonist stone Granary behind the Laboratory (5, 6, and 7 on town map, respectively). Successive generations of non-geologist Owens had converted David's Laboratory into a family residence, and my husband called it home. I felt more like bowing my head than looking up because I was, in essence, bringing a wreath to the graves of noble men and women. But an alive and unforgettable presence was standing in the doorway to greet us: Kenneth's elderly aunt Aline Owen Neal.
Auntie's freshly laundered white cotton dress, full and floor-length, did not conceal or diminish her somewhat triangular shape. A black, curving ear trumpet emerged like a ram's horn from the left side of her well-coiffed hair but was quickly lowered so both arms could embrace her nephew. Auntie didn't grasp what we were saying, but no matter: sweetly smiling, she nodded assent to Kenneth's every word. She had helped raise him. Ever since his first oil well, Kenneth had maintained her as the châtelaine of the Laboratory, a living monument to the Owen family.
I was no sooner inside than, like a stray cat, I wanted out. The twenty-foot-tall living room, designed to be a lecture hall with a gallery on three sides, was not hospitable. Several tables were stacked high with outdated newspapers and greeting cards. Auntie threw nothing away, perhaps because her nature was too gentle, her mind too comfortable in the past. As we hastened through the clutter to the circular dining room with its arched and diamond-hearted windows, I thought of the fairy tale that had captured my childhood imagination, where everyone, even the flies on the windowsills, had slept for a hundred years. In the story, a beautiful princess lay under an enchantment in a round tower. In the Laboratory, something as beautiful as a princess seemed to lie asleep, hidden from view, yet nonetheless palpably present. Could we summon enough love from our own hearts to awaken her and enough patience to recover her buried treasures?
My husband brought me out of my reveries and unanswered questions. "It's awfully hot in here, Jane. Let's step outside," he said, and held open the west door for me to enter an Old World courtyard, a square green space enclosed by a wall overhung with trumpet vines. A pair of gates had long ago opened for Owen carriages.
Beyond the north fence rose the sandstone and brick wall of the Granary, a massive structure that the German Harmonists had begun in 1814 and completed in 1822. Intended as a storehouse for food and grain, it could also serve as a fortress for protection. The Harmonists were avowed pacifists, so never a shot was fired from the tall, narrow slits of the ground floor. These openings were ventilators, not loopholes or meurtriers, the name of which was drawn from the French word for "murder."
Turning back toward the Laboratory, I looked up in wonder at the conical witch's-hat roof of the dining room and its weather vane. The directional markers—which would have pointed north, south, east, and west—were missing, but my eye lingered on a long, corkscrew-shaped column that supported a strange wooden fish. Time had battered its stomach and chewed its contours. Sensing my curiosity, Kenneth explained that the Paleozoic fossil fish had been great-uncle David's tribute to the naturalist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, one of the passengers on "The Boatload of Knowledge." Lesueur had not only studied the anatomy of fish but, an accomplished artist, also drawn and painted them. I later learned that the supporting rod itself is an enlargement of both a blastoid, Pentremites, as the base and a bryozoan, Archimedes, a corkscrew-shaped fossil dear to the hearts of geologists and an apt colophon for a laboratory dedicated to science.
Kenneth's blue eyes saddened as he ended his explanations. "We'll have to find a good craftsman to replace this tired old fossil. Enough of this gloomy, run-down place," he said. "I'll take you across this mess of lawn to the white-pillared house on the far corner of the property that once belonged to us. The Lab is the only house in town still in my family."
* * *
I remembered the same diffident look on Kenneth's handsome face a few years earlier beside an entrance door of my own parents' home. He had no idea I was watching through a window, fascinated by his gesture. Having rung the doorbell, he stepped back and with his right hand rubbed the signet ring on the little finger of his left hand. The ring was engraved with the double eagle that Hadrian's Roman army had brought to New Lanark in the second century AD. Robert Owen had adopted this image for his own crest and, being egalitarian, placed identical eagles on the buttons of the coats of his employees. The intensity of Kenneth's gesture seemed an unmistakable appeal to his ancestors for help in his pursuit of a difficult, pampered girl.
An appeal to ancestors for courage should come naturally from us, not only from a man in love. Many years later, words from Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust powerfully underscored my belief and spelled out the challenge given and taken by Kenneth. In a graveyard scene, a Gullah African American woman named Nana Peazant addresses her great-grandson Eli: "Those in this grave, like those who're across the sea, they're with us. They're all the same. The ancestors and the womb are one. Call on your ancestors, Eli. Let them guide you. You need their strength. Eli, I need you to make the family strong again, like we used to be."
Through the window at my parents' house, I saw a sensitive man appealing for guidance from earlier Owens and a never-to-be-underestimated mother. At the time, I could not yet appreciate the burden an alcoholic father places on a son's shoulders. Witnessing his appeal achieved what the daily arrival of a dozen pink roses and at Christmas a pair of antique Italian armchairs had failed to accomplish. At last, after two years of indifference to Kenneth's courtship, my self-centered ego moved over to make room for love and understanding. My parents announced our engagement shortly after my fortuitous awakening.
* * *
On that hot August day in New Harmony, the house that Kenneth and I were approaching stood on the sandstone foundation of Father George Rapp's 1822 mansion, which was originally a dignified three-story house (8 on town map). (Thomas Say's watercolor of the house is at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.) William Maclure, father of American geology and Robert Owen's financial partner, had owned Rapp's mansion. Maclure's brother Alexander inherited it. After a disastrous fire demolished all but the cellar and the apricot-colored foundation stones, Alexander planned the reconstruction.
Kenneth's briefing resumed. "The 1844 fire destroyed the Rapp house and much of the Maclure library, which was a great loss. Alexander built this really elegant house, thanks to a first-rate carpenter and contractor from England named John Beale. My great-grandfather Richard bought it from the Maclure estate in the 1850s and lived there. His son, Horace, sold it in 1901 to a prosperous grain merchant Captain John Corbin. That was lucky for the house and our family, as my grandfather could not afford to maintain it. The Corbins are fine people and good custodians," he concluded.
I feel grateful to Alexander Maclure, who chose not to rebuild in the Harmonists' style, with short German windows and low walls; instead, fourteen-foot-high walls frame ten-foot-high windows. He also added the distinctly southern long white veranda to the east entrance. But even with these positive changes, the house we were observing that sweltering August day in 1941 did not reflect Alexander's accomplishment. The shuttered windows and the once white-painted brick walls were now layered with soot from the soft coal the town used at that time.
As we returned across the lawn between the two houses, the faded negative of the Laboratory developed into a sharper, more credible image. Its black ironwork—scalloped and thick like Irish lace—embroidered the eaves of the slate roof, the front portico, and the entablature of the windows and doorways. An octagonal lantern crowned the roof of the erstwhile lecture hall. Chimney pots that individually reflected geometric shapes stood guard, alert sentinels.
"All of this for a working, teaching laboratory?" I asked myself. Then a revelation struck me: David Dale Owen, albeit a scholar-scientist, was also an artist and a romantic. Letters in the Owen archives bear witness to his love for his wife, Caroline. But even greater than conjugal love, here in his laboratory stood incontestable testimony of the driving force of his life: geology, his second marriage. He devoted the last years of his life to preparing a bridal bower for his beloved geology that others might share his passion and nurture a still-young and promising profession. David, with no thought of enriching himself or his family, had surveyed fourteen states, pointing the way to wealth for individuals and large companies that benefited from his discoveries.
Lines from a poem by Rumi accurately describe David Dale:
Love is recklessness, not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong, consuming herself,
unabashed.
I began to understand his two passions, that for his profession and that for his wife, Caro, as twin vows. David introduced me to the idea of a second marriage while married to the same person—an insurance policy for the safekeeping of a marriage covenant.
I did not share my fantasies with Kenneth, for his scientific mind would have thrown the light of reason upon my emotional response to his heritage. Having had to face practical and critical issues all his life, Kenneth sensibly outlined steps for the restoration of the Laboratory.
"The damn roof leaks, and every room needs replastering and fresh paint. Auntie's invasive memorabilia need some weeding out. Not that we'll begin right now."
"Oh, of course not now," I replied. "Only don't forget your plans for a new fossil fish!"
There had not been even a suggestion of a breeze during our tour, but suddenly a wind began to spin the fish westward, toward the route we would take across the Wabash to Texas. Of all my impressions of New Harmony and its imperatives, the parting image of the bruised but indestructible fish remains vivid, a symbol of the continuing challenge ahead.
This particular fish, high above a circular tower, is an apt emblem for New Harmony's two utopian experiments. The pious Harmonists would have valued it for its importance to the early Christian church, for the five initial letters of each word in the Greek phrase "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior" form the acronym ICHTHUS, meaning "fish." The Owenites would have seen in the fish identified by Charles-Alexandre Lesueur an appropriate symbol of their belief in the redemption of the world through scientific discovery and education. Was the wind that spun the fish telling us that, back to back, science and religion could together accomplish the unrealized hopes of Harmonists and Owenites?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New Harmony Indiana by Jane Blaffer Owen, Nancy Mangum McCaslin. Copyright © 2015 The Jane Blaffer Owen Management Trust. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword John Philip Newell
Foreword J. Pittman McGehee
Preface Jane Blaffer Owen
Acknowledgments Jane Blaffer Owen
Historical Note Connie A. Weinzapfel
From Spoken to Written Words Nancy Mangum McCaslin
1. Twin Vows
2. Indian Mound
3. The Sixth Generation
4. Harmonist House
5. Harmonist Church and School
6. Acquiring the Granary and Mansion
7. May Day Fête
8. Lipchitz
9. Enter Paul Tillich
10. Polio Epidemic
11. Sir George MacLeod
12. Iona
13. Assy
14. Kilbinger House
15. Poet's House and Beyond
16. Violets Down the Lane
17. Enter Philip Johnson
18. Cornerstone Dedication
19. May Day Dedication of the Roofless Church and Barrett-Gate House
20. Tillich Visits Houston
21. MacLeod's Dedication of the Lipchitz Gate
22. Estranged and Reunited: The New Being
23. The Undying Dead
24. Paul Tillich Park
25. Paul Tillich Commemorative Service
26. Open Windows
27. Tumbling Walls
28. Glass House
29. Orchard House
30. Rapp-Maclure-Owen House Restoration
31. Art and Carol's Garden
Epilogue
Editor's Note
Afterwords:
Life Was To Celebrate Anne Dale Owen
Through a Child's Eyes Jane Dale Owen
Biography Jane Blaffer Owen and Kenneth Dale Owen
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
This is a beautifully written and deeply affecting memoir by someone who is not only a mystic, mother, wife, daughter, and scholar, but a singular force unleashed upon the world.
Jane Blaffer Owen was a remarkable visionary and a woman of action. Both she and George MacLeod, a charismatic giant of the 20th century Church, shared a commitment to "creative restoration," the rebuilding of historic buildings-and indeed traditions–for a modern age.
This memoir is Jane Blaffer Owen's final gift to her beloved New Harmony. She consciously chose to devote precious days, months, and years from the end of her long life to reveal the origins and symbolism of the artistic, architectural, and landscape legacy she brought to her adopted home.
Jane Blaffer Owen was deeply committed to her mentor Paul Tillich as well as to his significant theological contributions. Her reflections on New Harmony bring both Mrs. Owen and her admiration for Tillich to life again.
Anne Dale Owen's reminiscence is touching, authentic, and truly revealing of the woman beloved by all who met her. Jane Dale Owen imparts the dedication and respect she had for her mother's generosity of spirit.
Jane Blaffer Owen was a remarkable visionary and a woman of action. Both she and George MacLeod, a charismatic giant of the 20th century Church, shared a commitment to "creative restoration," the rebuilding of historic buildings-and indeed traditions–for a modern age.
Owen's memoir is poetically told and is a powerful testament by an extraordinary woman who had a higher purpose. For her, sculpture was a prayer that could awaken the soul.
Jane Blaffer Owen created a modern cultural enclave that amalgamates the vital history and spirit of a bygone era with the creative energies of the present day.
Jane Blaffer Owen and Jacques Lipchitz shared a commitment to deep and peaceful collaboration among religions. It inspired Owen's tireless work to support and bring together leaders of many traditions. My father's inscription into the bronze Notre Dame de Liesse, that stands in New Harmony's Roofless Church, the Abbey of St. Columba on the Isle of Iona in Scotland, and the Church of Assy in France, resonates with Jane Owen's hopes. It reads,'Jacob Lipchitz, Jew, faithful to the religion of his ancestors, has made this Virgin to foster understanding between men on earth, that the life of the spirit may prevail.'
This memoir is Jane Blaffer Owen's final gift to her beloved New Harmony. She consciously chose to devote precious days, months, and years from the end of her long life to reveal the origins and symbolism of the artistic, architectural, and landscape legacy she brought to her adopted home.
This is a beautifully written and deeply affecting memoir by someone who is not only a mystic, mother, wife, daughter, and scholar, but a singular force unleashed upon the world.
New Harmony reflects Jane Owen's unique ability to combine contemplation with action, making the town an eternal altar that cherishes the past and looks toward the future.
Jane Blaffer Owen created a modern cultural enclave that amalgamates the vital history and spirit of a bygone era with the creative energies of the present day.