Ephrata
A monastic community of Sabbatarians in northern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Ephrata was founded in the late 1720s by (Georg) Conrad Beissel (1691-1768). During its peak period in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the community may have numbered over 300 people.
Its members wrote numerous religious hymns, developed a style of choir singing that profoundly impressed visitors, and left a rich legacy of illuminated manuscripts. They also constructed large monastic buildings whose architecture is thought to reflect religious symbolism. Ephrata attracted numerous visitors and the attention of European observers even in Beissel’s time. One of the most famous German exiles in the twentieth-century United States, Thomas Mann, incorporated a passage on Beissel and the choral music of Ephrata into his novel Doctor Faustus (1947). Today the remaining buildings are among thePennsylvania German culture area’s major tourist attractions.
The tenth child of a baker from Eber- bach in Palatinate who was orphaned as an eight-year-old, Conrad Beissel spent his youth in abject poverty. He was reportedly apprenticed to the baker’s trade and came to Heidelberg as a journeyman, where he had a conversion experience in a pietist circle in 1715. Three years later, he was apparently expelled from the Palatinate as a religious dissenter and lived with radical pietists in the Hessian principality of Isenburg-Budingen for some time. In 1720 he emigrated to North America and apprenticed himself to a weaver in Germantown, Pennsylvania. A year later he moved to the still sparsely settled Conestoga region, where he sought to live the solitary life of a hermit. In 1724 Beissel received baptism from the Dunker Peter Becker and subsequently became the leader of the Dunkers, a radical pietist group practicing adult baptism by immersion, in the Conestoga area.
Beissel gradually moved away from basic Dunker teachings, however, when he began to honor Saturday as the divinely ordained Sabbath and advocate celibacy. The renewed baptism of six members of his congregation in 1728 marked his break with the Dunkers. Four years later, Beissel moved to a solitary cabin on the banks of Cocalico Creek, but his adherents followed him and established their own dwellings. Single men and women lived in hermit cabins, while the so-called householders lived together in family units. This distinction between celibates and householders became a basic feature of life at Ephrata.In 1735 the community built the first monastic house for female celibates, whom Beissel organized into the Order of Spiri-
W.P.A. poster promoting the Ephrata Cloister, Lancaster County, PA. It reads, “Ephrata: Visit the ancient cloisters of the early German pietists in Lancaster Co., Pennsylvania,”ca. 1936—1941. (Library of Congress)
tual Virgins. A few years later, a communal house was constructed for the male celibates, who were organized as the Zionitic Brotherhood. In a veritable building boom, a number of additional buildings were erected until midcentury, and Beissel’s evangelizing attracted new converts, including the Reformed pastor Peter Miller and Pennsylvania’s Indian agent Conrad Weiser. Under the direction of the brothers Israel and Samuel Eckerlin, Ephrata also entered a phase of economic expansion: mills and workshops were built, and a printing press was acquired in 1745.
Beissel’s emphasis on celibacy has been traced to his peculiar understanding of the androgynous nature of God and the first man. In Beissel’s view God combined male and female characteristics in perfect balance, the female attributes being embodied in the conception of the divine virgin Sophia. The sexual difference between man and woman was interpreted as a consequence of original sin and humanity’s fall, and Beissel promoted chastity and discipleship as the way to eventual reunion with God.
A prolific author of theological and poetic works, Beissel developed a highly original mystical language to convey his sense of the presence of God. Beis- sel’s theology of redemption and rebirth and his eschatology drew on continental European sources, particularly on the mystic Jacob Boehme and the radical pietist writers Johann Georg Gichtel and Gottfried Arnold, and the community sought to express these concepts in its religious life and material culture. Life at Ephrata was structured by rituals like baptism by immersion and communal love feasts, and the celibates practiced an ascetic lifestyle that involved a sparse, mostly vegetarian diet, the tonsuring of heads, the wearing of white, hooded garments, and extended nightly prayer sessions.Conrad Beissel’s charismatic personality attracted numerous people, but his autocratic and occasionally erratic demeanor also caused repeated conflict. As early as 1745, Beissel expelled Israel Eckerlin, the leader of Ephrata’s communal economy, who may have become too influential for his taste. His final years were overshadowed by legal conflicts over property rights and challenges to his authority. After Beissel’s death in 1768, Peter Miller became the leader of the celibates, but the community was already in decline, and the last celibate woman died in 1813. Of the various offshoots of the Ephrata cloister established during the eighteenth century, all were short lived except the Antietam/Snow Hill congregation in south-central Pennsylvania, which flourished throughout the nineteenth century.
Mark Haberlein
See also Germantown, Pennsylvania; Mann, Thomas; Pennsylvania; Pietism; Weiser, Conrad
References and Further Reading
Alderfer, E. Gordon. The Ephrata Commune: An Early American Counterculture. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985.
Bach, Jeff. Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003.
Carpenter, Delburn. The Radical Pietists: Celibate Communal Societies Established in the United States before 1820. New York: AMS Press, 1975.