Jane Dale Owen

Jane Dale, the only one of Robert Owen's daughters to come to America, was born in 1806, filling (with her two sisters) the gap between William (1802) and David Dale (1807). She came to the United States in 1833 after her mother and two sisters had died in Scotland within a three-year period.

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Two of her brothers, David Dale and Richard, accompanied Jane to America. She brought her personal maid but realized immediately that such a servant was not suitable in New Harmony. Before discharging the maid, she educated the girl sufficiently so that she would be able to support herself by teaching at the infant school.

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Two years later, Jane Dale married Robert Henry Fauntleroy, and they moved in with her brothers in the "Mansion." In 1840, the Fauntleroys bought a Harmonist house, built in 1815, which quickly became a center for social and intellectual life in the 1840s and 1850s. 

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Fauntleroy was a Virginian. He had been privately tutored and self-educated and had a particular talent for mathematics and engineering. After his marriage, Fauntleroy was employed by the U.S. Topographical Bureau. He surveyed for internal improvements, e.g. railroads and canal routes. Fauntleroy was responsible for five wooden bridges built in the New Harmony area during the 1840s.

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Fauntleroy was also an inventor, having to his credit gun locks, weaving and cording machines, a fly-drive, an elliptograph, a cross level, and a small reflecting telescope, some of which were patented. Between 1846 and 1849, he worked on a coastal survey of the Gulf of Mexico. After a holiday with his family in New Harmony in 1849, he returned to the south where he died of cholera on Galveston Island.

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Jane Dale, always respected by her husband as an equal, was devastated by his death, but did not give up. In 1853, she took her children and accompanied her brother, Robert Dale, to his diplomatic post in Naples, Italy. While in Europe, she and her four children studied in Stuttgart, Germany. Considered their intellectual equal, Jane Dale was encouraged by her brothers to keep up her studies in the sciences all her life. In the mid-1840s, she conducted The New Harmony Seminary for Young Ladies and after she was widowed, she, from time to time, kept other schools.

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Jane Dale, however, spent most of her time reading and correcting proofs of David Dale Owen's geological reports. All of her brothers submitted their written works to her for approval and correction.

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In 1857, when Jane Dale and her family returned from Europe, her daughter Constance felt a lack of cultural stimulation she had enjoyed abroad. In 1859, Constance founded the Minerva Society for young women. It was one of the earliest women's clubs in the United States with a written constitution and by-laws. Constance's uncle, Robert Dale Owen, wrote the constitution.