The David Dale Owen Laboratory as it appeared on May 24, 1940, in the Historic American Buildings Survey.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS IND, 65-NEHAR, 1—2, Photograph by Lester Jones.
My husband brought me out of my reveries and unanswered questions. “It’s awfully hot in here, Jane. Let’s step outside,” he said, and held open the west door for me to enter an Old World courtyard, a square green space enclosed by a wall overhung with trumpet vines. A pair of gates had long ago opened for Owen carriages.
Beyond the north fence rose the sandstone and brick wall of the Granary, a massive structure that the German Harmonists had begun in 1814 and completed in 1822. Intended as a storehouse for food and grain, it could also serve as a fortress for protection. The Harmonists were avowed pacifists, so never a shot was fired from the tall, narrow slits of the ground floor. These openings were ventilators, not loopholes or meurtriers, the name of which was drawn from the French word for “murder.”
Turning back toward the Laboratory, I looked up in wonder at the conical witch’s-hat roof of the dining room and its weather vane. The directional markers—which would have pointed north, south, east, and west—were missing, but my eye lingered on a long, corkscrew-shaped column that supported a strange wooden fish. Time had battered its stomach and chewed its contours. Sensing my curiosity, Kenneth explained that the Paleozoic fossil fish had been great-uncle David’s tribute to the naturalist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, one of the passengers on “The Boatload of Knowledge.” Lesueur had not only studied the anatomy of fish but, an accomplished artist, also drawn and painted them. I later learned that the supporting rod itself is an enlargement of both a blastoid, Pentremites, as the base and a bryozoan, Archimedes, a corkscrew-shaped fossil dear to the hearts of geologists and an apt colophon for a laboratory dedicated to science.
Kenneth’s blue eyes saddened as he ended his explanations. “We’ll have to find a good craftsman to replace this tired old fossil. Enough of this gloomy, run-down place,” he said. “I’ll take you across this mess of lawn to the white-pillared house on the far corner of the property that once belonged to us. The Lab is the only house in town still in my family.”
I remembered the same diffident look on Kenneth’s handsome face a few years earlier beside an entrance door of my own parents’ home. He had no idea I was watching through a window, fascinated by his gesture. Having rung the doorbell, he stepped back and with his right hand rubbed the signet ring on the little finger of his left hand. The ring was engraved with the double eagle that Hadrian’s Roman army had brought to New Lanark in the second century AD. Robert Owen had adopted this image for his own crest and, being egalitarian, placed identical eagles on the buttons of the coats of his employees. The intensity of Kenneth’s gesture seemed an unmistakable appeal to his ancestors for help in his pursuit of a difficult, pampered girl.
An appeal to ancestors for courage should come naturally from us, not only from a man in love. Many years later, words from Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust powerfully underscored my belief and spelled out the challenge given and taken by Kenneth. In a graveyard scene, a Gullah African American woman named Nana Peazant addresses her great-grandson Eli: “Those in this grave, like those who’re across the sea, they’re with us. They’re all the same. The ancestors and the womb are one. Call on your ancestors, Eli. Let them guide you. You need their strength. Eli, I need you to make the family strong again, like we used to be.”2
Through the window at my parents’ house, I saw a sensitive man appealing for guidance from earlier Owens and a never-to-be-underestimated mother. At the time, I could not yet appreciate the burden an alcoholic father places on a son’s shoulders. Witnessing his appeal achieved what the daily arrival of a dozen pink roses and at Christmas a pair of antique Italian armchairs had failed to accomplish. At last, after two years of indifference to Kenneth’s courtship, my self-centered ego moved over to make room for love and understanding. My parents announced our engagement shortly after my fortuitous awakening.
On that hot August day in New Harmony, the house that Kenneth and I were approaching stood on the sandstone foundation of Father George Rapp’s 1822 mansion, which was originally a dignified three-story house (8 on town map). (Thomas Say’s watercolor of the house is at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.) William Maclure, father of American geology and Robert Owen’s financial partner, had owned Rapp’s mansion. Maclure’s brother Alexander inherited it. After a disastrous fire demolished all but the cellar and the apricot-colored foundation stones, Alexander planned the reconstruction.
Kenneth’s briefing resumed. “The 1844 fire destroyed the Rapp house and much of the Maclure library, which was a great loss. Alexander built this really elegant house, thanks to a first-rate carpenter and contractor from England named John Beale.3 My great-grandfather Richard bought it from the Maclure estate in the 1850s and lived there. His son, Horace, sold it in 1901 to a prosperous grain merchant Captain John Corbin. That was lucky for the house and our family, as my grandfather could not afford to maintain it. The Corbins are fine people and good custodians,” he concluded.
The Rapp-Maclure-Owen House circa 1935, showing exterior detail of front portico, in the Historic American Buildings Survey.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS IND, 65-NEHAR, 12—2, Photograph by Alexander Piaget, Piaget-van Ravenswaay Photography.
I feel grateful to Alexander Maclure, who chose not to rebuild in the Harmonists’ style, with short German windows and low walls; instead, fourteen-foot-high walls frame ten-foot-high windows. He also added the distinctly southern long white veranda to the east entrance. But even with these positive changes, the house we were observing that sweltering August day in 1941 did not reflect Alexander’s accomplishment. The shuttered windows and the once white-painted brick walls were now layered with soot from the soft coal the town used at that time.
As we returned across the lawn between the two houses, the faded negative of the Laboratory developed into a sharper, more credible image. Its black ironwork—scalloped and thick like Irish lace—embroidered the eaves of the slate roof, the front portico, and the entablature of the windows and doorways. An octagonal lantern crowned the roof of the erstwhile lecture hall. Chimney pots that individually reflected geometric shapes stood guard, alert sentinels.
“All of this for a working, teaching laboratory?” I asked myself. Then a revelation struck me: David Dale Owen, albeit a scholar-scientist, was also an artist and a romantic. Letters in the Owen archives bear witness to his love for his wife, Caroline. But even greater than conjugal love, here in his laboratory stood incontestable testimony of the driving force of his life: geology, his second marriage. He devoted the last years of his life to preparing a bridal bower for his beloved geology that others might share his passion and nurture a still-young and promising profession. David, with no thought of enriching himself or his family, had surveyed fourteen states, pointing the way to wealth for individuals and large companies that benefited from his discoveries.
Lines from a poem by Rumi accurately describe David Dale:
Love is recklessness, not reason.
Reason