The tiny historic community of New Harmony, Indiana, might not be the eclectic haven it is today had Jane Blaffer Owen chosen a different path in life.

Owen, who died in 2010 at age 95, was wealthier than most Americans can imagine.  Indeed, her substantial means opened virtually endless avenues for isolating herself in self-indulgence.  However, the Houston resident instead devoted most of her life to philanthropy that included not only restoring and preserving New Harmony but also adding to its quirky vibe.

“Indeed, it is the spirit of New Harmony that is Mrs. Owen’s true legacy,” wrote admirer Robert Ferre, who started a business to advance a revival of labyrinths similar to the Harmonist Labyrinth on the edge of the community.

Born a year after the outbreak of World War I, Jane Blaffer was the daughter and granddaughter of oil tycoons who established companies now known as ExxonMobile and Texaco. An education at a succession of private schools led to her studying under influential liberal theologian Paul Tillich at Union Theological Seminary in New York. It was her marriage in 1941 to oil entrepreneur Kenneth Owen that opened her heart to New Harmony, which is on the Wabash River in the southwestern tip of Indiana.  Kenneth Owen was a great-great grandson of Robert Dale Owen, a weaving industrialist from Scotland who bought the town in 1825 as a laboratory for testing his social reform.

New Harmony had been founded in the wilderness a decade earlier by German immigrant George Rapp.  The Harmony Society focused on the second return of Christ but the Rappist commune dwindled due to disillusionment over the anticipated millennium failing to materialize and because its adherents did not marry or have children.