Other members West Union (Busro) is an abandoned Shaker community in Busseron Township, northwestern Knox County, Indiana, about fifteen miles (24 km) north of Vincennes.
[1] While the Shakers' unique ideas about communal ownership of property, sexual equality, celibacy, and economic cooperation appealed to many new settlers driven by religious fervor and the harshness of life on the frontier, their initial reception by some frontiersmen was not auspicious.
Fearing that celibate utopians would break up families and compete with established churches, when Issachar Bates and fellow Shaker missionaries came to Indiana around 1809, a few settlers there resorted to violence to keep them away.
Bates recalled that on his second trip to the Wabash Valley: a mob of 12 men on horseback came upon us with ropes to bind us, headed by [one] John Thompson.
According to some sources, Bates eventually walked 38,000 miles (61,000 km) in eleven years and converted 1100 people across Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana to the Shaker faith.
[4]In 1809, a large group of recent converts from Union Village, near Dayton, Ohio, many of them free African Americans, loaded their property onto keel boats and pirogues and headed down the Ohio River, bound for a new settlement at "Big Prairy," on Busseron Creek, fifteen miles (24 km) north of Fort Knox at Vincennes, Indiana Territory.
[5] Shaker diarist Samuel Swan McClelland, whose account runs until 1827, notes that among the first buildings constructed was "One hewed-log house... with 4 rooms, and all things seemed to be going well for the present."
A map by the Shaker cartographer Richard McNemar, drawn in the 1820s, shows that at its height, West Union contained 1,300 acres (5.3 km2) of land, "400 well improved.
In the summer of 1811, he wrote: "About the first week in June some few were taken sick with fevers, and on the 19th, Anthony Tann a colored man departed this life, having Peggy his wife a white woman and 6 children among the believers.
The Shakers soon discovered that they had built West Union on an Indian trail and war path, the traditional route of communication with (and attack against) white settlement at Vincennes.
In August, 1811, William Henry Harrison, the Indiana Territory's military governor, met with the Shawnee leader Tecumseh at Vincennes, but according to McClellan, "the Indians went away about as ill humor'd as they came."
[9]En route to the Shawnee stronghold at Prophetstown farther up the Wabash in the autumn of 1811, where he narrowly defeated a Native American confederacy at the Battle of Tippecanoe, Harrison's army of 1400 men left Vincennes and "encamped on Snaps Prairy about 1 mile from our meeting house."
In the winter of 1811, the New Madrid Seismic Zone, centered in southeastern Missouri and northeastern Arkansas, began a period of extremely strong activity that caused the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded in the Midwest.
[10]McClelland also recorded the widespread fear and sense of doom that pervaded the area for months, as the Earth’s crust continued to heave and settle.
Seeded by decades of backcountry revivals and "awakenings," fear of the earthquakes was heightened by apocalyptic foretellings of the coming end of time.
At the time of the earthquakes and the fever epidemic of 1811–12, West Union's population was still sizable, with McClelland reporting that "75 boys and 56 girls with a suitable family of brethren and sisters" were at the schoolhouse.
Thinking it better to temporarily abandon West Union rather than be abused by the militia or massacred by hostile war parties, the Shaker community loaded their property onto boats and headed downstream in mid-September 1812.
A few Shakers stayed behind to look after West Union, but "the Army was soon increased to 1000, our houses were converted to Barracks, our nurseries to horse lots and our fields to racing grounds.
Farmland and buildings were sold, and portable property was loaded onto wagons and boats for transport to the same communities in Kentucky and Ohio where Shakers had taken refuge during the War of 1812.
An immense amount of effort had been put into ensuring its success, as it represented the Society's best chance of expanding farther west, where the nation's future lay.
[15] There seems to have been some relationship between the West Union Shakers and the German Rappite utopian community that settled around New Harmony, Indiana, also on the Wabash River.
[16] In 1824, only a few years before West Union itself was abandoned, the Rappites moved back to Pennsylvania, selling their land to the Welsh utopian thinker and reformer Robert Owen, who renamed the site New Harmony.
Inspired in part by the utopian ideals of his Rappite and Shaker predecessors in the Wabash Valley, the secular Owen began the most famous socialist experiment in American history.
Archaeological remains of other buildings in the area have been unearthed by local historian John Martin Smith, but are unmarked and difficult to find.