06/17/2026
Week 2 and 3
Two weeks ago, we introduced the strand of Robert Owen's hair in Historic New Harmony's collection and talked about why Victorians kept hair at all. This week, we can tell you exactly how it got here—and who carried it.
But first: who was Robert Owen?
Owen arrived in New Harmony, Indiana in 1825 with a bold idea. He believed that people are shaped entirely by the world around them. If you changed the conditions people lived, worked, and learned in, you could change the people themselves. He purchased the town from the Harmonists and set out to build a new kind of community—one based on cooperation, education, and shared purpose. The experiment lasted about two years before it fell apart. Owen went back to Britain and kept working, largely undeterred.
He was magnetic and generous—and, by most accounts, genuinely hard to work with. He was so certain of his ideas that compromise didn’t come easily. But people believed in him for decades and across continents. That belief is written into the provenance of this strand of hair.
The story is recorded on a small note attached to the microscope slide that holds the strand, documented by M. Denner in 1979.
When Robert Owen died on November 17, 1858, a man named Mr. R. Lewis took a lock of his hair. Lewis sent it to a Mrs. Truelove. We believe she may have been the wife of Edward Truelove, an English publisher who supported Owen’s ideas. Edward Truelove was so committed to those ideas that he was sent to prison for four months in 1878. His crime? Publishing a treatise called “Moral Physiology,” written by Owen’s son Robert Dale Owen. This publication supported birth control and discussed overpopulation and its effects on society.
The lock of hair was then divided with George Jacob Holyoake. Holyoake was a British writer and leader in the cooperative movement—a movement that believed people could work together, share resources, and build fairer communities. In 1851, just seven years before Owen’s death, Holyoake had coined the word “secularism.” Secularism is the idea that society should be guided by reason and human welfare rather than religious beliefs. Holyoake developed these ideas partly because of Owen’s influence on him.
Holyoake’s wife later donated her portion of the hair to the Co-operative Union Ltd. in Manchester, England. That organization—now known as Co-operatives UK—was created to support and organize co-operative societies and show how powerful cooperation could be in everyday life.
In 1974, Dr. Donald Pitzer, a history professor at the University of Southern Indiana, brought a single strand of Owen’s hair to the United States, preserved on a microscope slide. It came to Historic New Harmony through the Josephine Elliott Collection.
That chain of custody matters. Every name in it belongs to someone who understood why Robert Owen mattered—and who decided his hair was worth preserving and passing forward. A strand of hair traveled from Owen’s deathbed in Wales to a collection in southwestern Indiana. The people who carried it knew exactly what they were holding.
takes a deeper look at one object from Historic New Harmony’s museum collection each month, exploring it through a different lens each week.
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FURTHER READING:
Argyle, Ray. Inventing Secularism: The Radical Life of George Jacob Holyoake. McFarland & Co., 2021. (The first modern biography of Holyoake, written for a general audience).
Claeys, Gregory, ed. A New View of Society and Other Writings. Penguin Books, 1991. (The best accessible collection of Owen's own writings).
Donnachie, Ian. Robert Owen: Owen of New Lanark and New Harmony. Tuckwell Press, 2000. (The first full biography of Owen in over fifty years at time of publication).
Holyoake, George Jacob. Sixty Years of an Agitator's Life. 1892. (Holyoake's autobiography).
Owen, Robert. The Life of Robert Owen. 2 vols. 1857-1858. (Owen's own autobiography, written in the final year of his life. Available free through the Internet Archive). https://archive.org/details/lifeofrobertowen0000owen
Pitzer, Donald E., ed. America's Communal Utopias. University of North Carolina Press, 1997. (Seventeen essays on America's utopian communities, including Pitzer's own chapter on Robert Owen and New Harmony).
