The arrival of Welsh social reformer Robert Owen on American shores in the fall of 1824 was met with public curiosity and expectation.

Owen's ideas about the relationship between human behavior and happiness and the material conditions of their existence were familiar to intellectuals in the United States from about 1817, when they were publicized in various British reviews.

[1] In response, those favoring the communitarian ideal had established an organization called the New York Society for Promoting Communities, a group headed by a Quaker apothecary named Cornelius C.

An article exists in the local paper titled "The short and unhappy life of a backwoods Utopia" by Isabelle Savell Adding to the discord was the arrival of Houston and his atheist associates, who immediately set about secularizing the community's schools, encouraging Sunday labor in violation of Biblical precepts, and establishing a "Church of Reason" — backing their actions with anti-religious quotations from Robert Owen's written works.

[4] Houston would be joined in his editorial task by Abner Kneeland, whose subsequent trial for blasphemy would prove to be one of the landmark political events of the decade of the 1830s.