John M. Tate, Jr. Collection of Notes, Pictures and Documents relating to the Harmony Society

About John M. Tate, Jr. and the Harmonists

John M. Tate, Jr., was a mechanical engineer by profession who, as a school boy, became interested in documenting the Harmony Society of Economy (Beaver County, Pa.). Tate was born in May of 1870 in Allegheny City, Pa., and received a private education at the Sewickley Academy in Sewickley, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. While attending the academy he traveled along the Ohio River between the villages of Sewickley and Economy in his leisure time. During his travels he became acquainted with the members of the Harmony Society and photographed its buildings and some of its members. Later in life, Tate became a member of the Harmony Society Historical Association and created lectures and programs on the history of the Harmonists.

Professionally, Tate was employed by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company before organizing his own engineering firm, Tate, Jones and Company, in Pittsburgh. The company designed and erected cooling stations for locomotives and was known for their work with industrial furnaces. Socially, Tate held membership in the Duquesne and Edgeworth Clubs. He and his spouse, Ernestine Payne Tate, resided in Sewickley and were members of the Sewickley Presbyterian Church.

The Harmony Society was a communal religious community that traced its beginnings to Iptingen in the Duchy of Württemberg, near present day Stuttgard, Germany in 1785. Following persecution by the Lutheran Church, several hundred members immigrated to Butler County, Pa., in 1804 and formed the community of Harmony under the leadership of Johann George Rapp (1757-1847). The community resided at the Butler County location until 1814, when they relocated and created the town of New Harmony, situated along the Wabash River in Posey County, in the southwest corner of Indiana. They remained at the Indiana location until 1824. In 1825, the Indiana property was sold to Robert Owen, a Welsh social reformer who made an attempt to form a utopian community at the site, which ultimately failed.

The Harmonists returned to Pennsylvania, settled along the Ohio River and formed the community of Economy, which is today incorporated into the Borough of Ambridge. Here the society erected a variety of buildings associated with community and economic life including homes, a feast hall, a church, cotton mill, woolen mill, a wine press, a hotel, post office, saw mills, stores, orchards, and vegetable and flower gardens. The Society began silk production and weaving as early as 1828. Eventually the business holdings of the society would grow to include investments in land and in the railroad systems that boomed following the American Civil War.

As George Rapp aged and ultimately died in 1847, the business of the society was managed by a series of trustees that include Romulius Baker, Jacob Henrici, Jonathan Lenz, and John S. Duss. By 1905 the membership of the Harmony Society included only three members and the society was dissolved.

It was during the later years of the nineteenth century that John M. Tate, Jr. began documenting the Harmonist Society, thus he witnessed the decline of the communal organization and created and preserved photographs and documents which serve as historical evidence. By 1916, efforts to preserve the buildings of the Harmonists were begun when the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania purchased many of the structures to create “Old Economy Village,” a museum that is operated by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Shortly after the site was acquired by the state, Pittsburgh architect Charles Morse Stotz, a pioneer in historic preservation, documented the site by creating measured drawings of floor plans and exterior elevations for many of the structures. These drawings were contributed as documentation to the Historic American Buildings Survey which also led to the structures being listed on the National Register of Historic Places.