Faded Glory

February 4th, 2006
New Harmony, IN


Earlier today we had the unexpected pleasure of an afternoon in Cairo, IL; confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. We were just trying to make time on two-lane roads and our route put Cairo in our path. We had lunch on the levee at the edge of the utterly ruined and abandoned downtown. The ghostly skeletons of the buildings reminded me of Havana. That the town lies at the union of one of the most storied transportation routes in North America, is tough to understand. All around Cairo (pronounced kay-ro) you can see evidence of the wealth that once flowed into the town (pun intended). Yet now, the streets look a little like the communists took over and sent the last three generations out to work on collective farms.

We spent the night just outside of the above state park and woke up to drive into the small town of New Harmony, IN. For a couple decades in the early 1800s New Harmony was an intentional community of like-minded Christian folks who wanted to live cooperatively. I don’t know much more than that about their background but they valued work, prayerful reflection and beauty in their surroundings. The physical legacy they left behind is certainly worth a visit. The seeds of their values took root and New Harmony is a small town with a very well kept collection of buildings going back over 200 years. The residents who followed the founders built and maintained beautiful parks in addition to the buildings.

Someone along the way recognized the unique quality of New Harmony and a combination of the state, a nearby university and the residents themselves set up a preservationist foundation to maintain the town and set up the infrastructure to allow visitors to explore it. Somehow, they raised the funds to build a museum and visitor center designed by Richard Meier (of the Getty Musem fame). In the early nineteen sixties they got Philip Johnson to design an outdoor worship area; a roofless church, really (see our photos), that is one of the most spiritual places I have ever set foot.

New Harmony was a gem that I’d never even heard of before our visit. Cairo was a place I remembered from Mark Twain and numerous other references. What different paths unfolded for each. Cairo looks like it had everything going for it but, whether it was rail or the interstate highway system or something else, it tripped up badly and never recovered. New Harmony looked like its ambitions were much more modest so it had a shorter distance to fall. It’s still a sleepy ‘retreat’ of a town but one can see making a life there.