One hundred twenty people at the same table

The house was two hundred ten feet long and twenty-four feet wide, two stories, with a veranda running the front of both.

The dining room sat in the middle of the ground floor, forty feet by twenty-four. The schoolroom was directly above it, big enough for all the children in the building.

Joseph B. Wade was a boy there. Thirty years later he wrote down what he remembered, and what he chose to say about the school was that he never afterward attended a better one.

A hundred and twenty people lived under that roof and ate at that table.

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They called it the LaGrange Phalanx.

The constitution ran to thirty articles and was framed in 1844 on the doctrines of Charles Fourier, as modified and published the year before by Albert Brisbane in New York. The Indiana legislature granted a charter to three men: William S. Prentiss, Benjamin Jones, and Harvey Olmstead.

Eleven more joined in the first year. Jesse Huntsman, Alanson Mason, William Anderson, John H. Cutler, Eliphalet Warner, L. H. Stocker, Prentiss H. Evans, William Sheldon, a Dr. Richardson, Hart Hazen, and Margaret Wade, who was Joseph's mother.

The county historian, writing forty years on, calls the name a rather warlike one.

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The work was run by three councils.

The Council of Industry laid out and directed everything agricultural and mechanical. The Council of Commerce handled all buying, selling, and trade. The Council of Education, made up of the best teaching talent they had, ran the school and everything to do with it. Each council had at least three members and the president sat on all of them.

Under the councils, the work split into groups of three to eight people. Each group chose its own foreman, and the foreman reported every member's time to the secretary once a week, in days and hours.

Article Sixteen set the rate at seventy-five cents for a ten hour day.

But it was written so that ten hours of the man who plowed were paid the same as eight hours of the man who grubbed stumps. They had looked at the two jobs and decided one of them was worth more per hour than the other, and they put the ratio in the constitution.

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These were not drifters who had wandered in from somewhere.

William S. Prentiss was born poor in Massachusetts and put out as a store clerk for his board and clothes on the condition that he stay until he turned twenty-one. He stayed two years past that at a small wage, then put himself through college by teaching school between terms, and attended Harvard until 1826. He studied civil engineering in Boston, came west in the fall of 1832, and entered land on Section 31.

He married Jane M. Clark that Christmas Day and drove to White Pigeon the next morning to buy their housekeeping outfit, which he packed into a barrel and brought home.

He served as county commissioner and two terms as probate judge. The county history published in 1882 credits the organization of Springfield Township, and the moving of the county seat to LaGrange, as much to him as to anyone.

Benjamin Jones came out from Virginia in 1829 and rented ground near Lexington until 1832, when he bought four hundred acres in Sections 20 and 21 at the first public land sale ever held in this county. He had served in the War of 1812. He brought the first thoroughbred cattle into the county. The township's first election was held in his house in August of 1834.

The Phalanx stood on his farm.

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It lasted about four years.

Wade, writing in 1876, thought he knew why it did not last longer, and he did not blame the idea. He blamed the door. Too little care was taken about who was let in. Adventurers came, some because they had nowhere else to go and some to get through a winter and leave in the spring.

He also wrote that the careful men of the Phalanx, with what they had learned, could have built a better one afterward. They did not.

It was wound up in 1847 or 1848 by William Seaburn and Ephraim Seeley, commissioned to do it exactly as the constitution provided, and settled without a lawsuit.

By 1876, of everyone who had lived in that house, six remained in the county.

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It was not the only attempt, and it was not the first.

The year before the Phalanx was chartered, a group at Lexington completed an association on March 5, 1843, and called themselves the Congregation of Saints. Their basis was religious rather than Fourierist, and their preamble was printed in the LaGrange Freeman that April.

They wrote that they were deeply sensible of the innumerable evils afflicting all classes of society, and that they despaired of any deliverance through the present social and political systems, which they believed were at variance with the principles of Christianity.

They proposed to buy and farm somewhere between two and six thousand acres. They proposed to divide what the work produced on a scale where each would as nearly as possible reap what he sowed. They proposed to make provision for the aged and the afflicted.

And they wrote down three more things they meant to do. Abolish the distinction of master and servant. Preserve individuality. Secure the rights and extend the privileges of women.

They ended by naming the two precepts they were trying to put into practice, which were to love your neighbor as yourself and to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The man who formed them is the subject of his own piece, which is where his name and theirs are joined.

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The newspaper that printed it was not persuaded.

The editor asked what next, and what the end of all these associations would be, and said that time alone would reveal it. If they proved beneficial he would rejoice. If disastrous, the consequences would be awful. The matter, he wrote, looked dark to him.

A contributor in the same issue said he had no confidence in visionary theorists, these philosophic and intellectual benefactors of mankind who were forming new principles of association and government under which offenses would cease and men become peaceful and harmless as doves.

The Saints, the county history says, hardly got organized before disorganization commenced.

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Fourteen years later, some of the same men met again.

In June of 1858 a group gathered in Springfield Township and resolved to build a hall. The names on the record are William S. Prentiss, Jesse Huntsman, Benjamin Jones, Harvey Olmstead, Ed Dyer, and George Thompson.

Four of the six had been in the Phalanx.

What they signed was short. They agreed to pay the sums beside their names toward a hall that would be open for lectures, discourses, and discussions on various subjects, with no favor to any one sect or class of persons, and which would never be closed to anyone who wished, within the bounds of good behavior, to advocate, explain, or discuss his or her opinions.

It cost about eight hundred dollars. They called it Union Hall.

The county history notes, in 1882, that the orthodox denominations avoid using it.

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Benjamin Jones was raised a Baptist and died a Spiritualist. He was eighty-seven when the county history went to press, living in Nebraska, planning to come back and spend what was left at his daughter's house in this county.

Jane Prentiss was raised Presbyterian and, the same book says, in after years grew out of that school to a more liberal belief. She had taught the first school in Greenfield Township in 1830, for two dollars a week and boarding around, before any of the rest of it happened.

Her husband, the Harvard man who moved the county seat, is described in his own obituary sketch as liberal in religious matters, inclining to a conservative spiritual belief.

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The county historian finished his account of all of it with a sentence that reads like a man who knew what was coming.

But for these reminiscences, he wrote, very few of this day would know such societies were ever advocated and formed in the county.

He was right, and it took less time than he might have guessed. When the next county history came through in 1920, the LaGrange Phalanx got one clause in a chronology and a mention as a landmark on a plank road.