| Harmonist Room: Here
is gathered most of the museum's collection of Harmonist furniture. It
has been arranged to depict the lifestyle of the communal group. Encased
artifacts supplement the docent's description of Harmonist beliefs and
accomplishments. |
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| The Kitchen:
Artifacts displayed here were generated in a period that covers well over
one hundred years. The table is Harmonist. A carved stone dry sink and a
few utensils are of Harmonist origin. Collections of churns, buttermolds
and crockery, and an enormous cast iron cookstove, are not Harmonist.
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| The Wine Cellar:
Outside the kitchen and just off the hall is a narrow stairs, a shortcut
descending to join the wine cellar's magnificent cut stone steps. These
originally led through massive wooden doors to the outdoors. The vaulted
stone wine cellar, dressed-stone entry and floor are marvels of
engineering. Stone for the floor was cut at the nearby Harmonist quarry,
and fitted on flat ground, with each piece numbered to match the next.
Transported to the wine cellar, the giant puzzle was reassembled. To
build the arching ceiling, we are told, cut stone was laid up over a
wooden rack and cemented into place. After the vital keystones were set,
the rack was disassembled and removed. Grapes were crushed outdoors and
the wine fermented in the cellar's consistent 50-65 degree temperature.
Ascending to the museum hallway again, one views a likeness of Father
Rapp. There is also a copy of the original deed to Harmonie written on
sheepskin. Harmonie and its environs were sold in 1815 to Abraham
Ziegler, a Mennonite blacksmith from eastern Pennsylvania.
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| The Mennonite Room:
Houses the museum's Mennonite era collection. From his
framed likeness on the wall opposite the entryway, Abraham Ziegler seems
to oversee all, including a homey setting of a walking wheel, yarn
measured, cane-seated rockers, and so forth. Fine brass-edged showcases
contain smaller articles. A primitive corner cupboard was hand-crafted in
the 1840s. A photograph of the 1825 Mennonite meeting house is also
displayed. This stands not far from the museum and is the most original
early Mennonite meeting house in the nation.
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Gunsmith Charles
Flowers: Harmony’s Charles Flowers made percussion long rifles in the
classical Pennsylvania style ca. 1850-1890. A former coal miner, he
changed careers at about the age of 30 to build custom rifles by hand when
relatively inexpensive factory-made rifles were becoming readily
available. Flowers rifles have a long barrel engraved "C. Flowers" or
"C.F." in script on the top flat, and are fully stocked in curly maple
with back-action locks. A most distinctive feature is a brass plate
protect the stock from corrosive effect of percussion cap flash. Other
elements that generally distinguish Flowers' rifles include incised butt
and fore stock carving, decorative patch box and German silver
escutcheons, inlays and other silver or brass mountings, incised lines
framing the sights, fore stock wear plates of German silver or brass, and
decorated muzzle faces. Flowers, a Civil War veteran, died in 1897 and was
buried behind the Mennonite meetinghouse north of Harmony. His shop was
behind the family home two blocks from the town diamond. Neither survived
the 20th century.
The Harmony Museum’s
remarkable Ball Collection exhibits 10 rifles spanning Flowers’ career.
Generally reflecting the requirements of those for whom they were built,
they range in appearance from plain to ostentatious. Among them are the
earliest known example of Flowers' work (ca. 1850-55), and the lavishly
decorated rifle pictured in Henry J. Kauffman's book “The
Pennsylvania-Kentucky Rifle.”
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| The History Room:
This
room's exhibits represent other elements of area history. These
include Native American
artifacts, George Washington's 1753 mission through the region, postcards and documents from the region's past, working model of
an early 20th century oil well, and primitive implements from
Early America.
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Native Americans:
The earliest known native occupation of southwestern Pennsylvania was ca.
14,000 B.C. A much later people called the Monongahela, of whom little is
known, disappeared from the region early in the 17th century. Although the
region never had a large permanent native population, a number of
settlements appeared and disappeared between the late 1600s and late
1700s. Most were Lenni Lenape, called Delawares by Europeans, and
Shawnees. In 1753 George Washington visited a Delaware village on the
Connoquenessing Creek where Harmony would be established by German
immigrants 51 years later. The Harmony Museum’s History Room exhibit
includes native artifacts representative of the region’s 18th century
Native American populations. Many, although not all, were collected
locally. The collection includes war clubs, ax heads, arrow and spear
points, and fish hooks.
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Washington Starts
French & Indian War: George Washington precipitated the first global
war with a 1753 military mission to what would become western
Pennsylvania. American history would likely have been much different had
he been killed in either of two very close calls here late that December.
In the region, only the Harmony Museum has a permanent exhibit describing
his mission and its route. Butler County has marked highways and Moraine
State Park hiking and biking trails with “Washington 1753” signs for the
convenience of tourists wishing to follow Washington’s approximate path
within the county, and other counties are preparing to do so.
Britain won its contest
with France for the unsettled Ohio Valley and Northwestern Territories in
what came to be called the French and Indian War, the North American part
of what expanded into the global Seven Years’ War.
On Oct. 31, 1753, Virginia
militia Major George Washington, then 21, left Williamsburg for Ft.
LeBoeuf, south of Lake Erie, with Gov. Robert Dinwiddie’s demand that the
French withdraw from British territory and to assess the French military.
Traveling in bad weather and guided by Christopher Gist, he slept Nov. 30
at a Delaware Indian village where Harmony would be established a
half-century later. At Ft. LeBoeuf the French responded to Dinwiddie’s
ultimatum by demanding the British get out of New France, and war was
assured. On Dec. 27, Washington and Gist returned to the Indian village
visited weeks before, where one of “a party of French Indians” offered to
show them to the Forks of the Ohio, then led them off course and shot at
Washington but missed. Two days later Washington survived a spill into the
ice-choked Allegheny River. He arrived in Williamsburg on Jan. 16, 1754.
The French soon evicted
Virginians from the Forks of the Ohio and built Ft. Duquesne there. In the
first skirmishes of the French & Indian War, Lt. Col. Washington’s militia
attacked a small French unit on May 28, 1754, at Great Meadows (near
Uniontown), and a substantial force won revenge with Washington’s
humiliating surrender July 4 at nearby Ft. Necessity. |
Click to view the map
of Washington's Trail.
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| The Victorian Room:
Furniture and other pieces associated with the Victorian
era are grouped here in a parlor setting. Among these are an early piano, European bone
china, a rocking horse (with horse hair tail and mane) and folding chairs
with Brussels fabric are well over a century old. A huge framed charcoal
drawing of Mrs. Elias Ziegler in her "widow's weeds" is hung in one
corner.
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| The
Andrew Ziegler Ziegler Log House:
Across Main Street from the museum is a dwelling made of huge hand-hewn
oak logs. It was disassembled in nearby Middle Lancaster and reconstructed on its present site
as a U.S. Bicentennial project. Used as an educational site, the house contains
early American furniture as well as implements for spinning and weaving,
rope-making, dyeing corn grindings, bread making and other crafts.
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The Wagner-Bentel House:
This is the sole brick duplex that the Harmonists built, constructed for
two sisters and their families. The structure, although containing only
one chimney, had two very large stone fireplaces, one for each family.
Walled over at some time in the past, they have been restored by the
museum. One room's exhibits address the local medical profession of the
19th and 20th centuries. An important artifact displayed here is
the huge clock that once hung in the tower of the Harmonist Meetinghouse
close to the museum. Souvenirs, craft goods, and books, may be purchased here in the Museum Shop.
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| The Harmonist Cemetery:
During the 10 years the Harmonists were at Harmony, 100 members of
the Society were buried in the commune's cemetery just east of town. The
Society did not mark the graves of its dead. A memorial to George Rapp's
son, Johannes, who died in Harmony, was created by
non-Harmonists. The Harmony Society contracted with Mennonite
Stoneworkers in 1869 to construct the cemetery wall and its unique
one-ton rotating gate.
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Harmonist Log House:
A museum annex on the north side of Mercer Street two blocks east of the
main museum building, it was a gift from a local company and reconstructed
on a donated lot. It stood originally in the west end of old Harmony.
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Vineyard Hill &
Rapp’s Seat:
On Evergreen Mill Road at the north end of the Mercer Road bridge in
Harmony, the heavily wooded hillside overlooking the Connoquenessing Creek
was the site of the Harmony Society’s vineyard. A seat carved into a rock
outcrop is where society leader Georg Rapp meditated. Partially accessible
by a steep, difficult trail.
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The Region's
Oldest Barn: On the west side of Mercer Road just north of the bridge,
it was purchased in 1999 to prevent demolition of the last surviving barn
among the three communities built by the Harmony Society. The 1805 barn
housed the Society’s Marino sheep and was re-roofed ca. 1850, perhaps as
the consequence of tornado damage, by David Ziegler, a son of Harmony’s
Mennonite “second founder” Abraham Ziegler.
Restoration to the1805-1850 period was completed in
2005
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2005 |
| The Mennonite Meetinghouse: Harmony's Mennonites built their stone meetinghouse in 1825
near their hilltop cemetery just north of town. The brick annex was an
early addition. Services were always conducted in German. The
congregation dwindled as the 19th century progressed, and the last
regular services to be held in the meetinghouse occured in 1902. It is
the oldest Mennonite meetinghouse west of the Alleghenies, and the most
original early Mennonite meetinghouse in the nation.
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