Ephrata Cloister

Ephrata Cloister was colonial America's most ambitious experiment in leaving the world. Conrad Beissel — German Pietist, mystic, fugitive from European persecution — founded the community on Cocalico Creek in 1732 to await the imminent Second Coming. By the 1750s nearly eighty celibate Brothers and Sisters lived in the striking half-timbered buildings, sleeping on benches with wooden blocks for pillows, waking at midnight for vigil, eating one sparse vegetarian meal a day — while 250 Householder families lived normally on the surrounding farms.

The community's austerity produced an explosion of art — the Fraktur calligraphy that was America's first folk art in that style, over a thousand original hymns composed under Beissel's own rules of harmony and sung a cappella, and a printing office that produced the largest book printed in colonial America: the 1,500-page Martyrs Mirror, translated and published for the Mennonites. The celibate community that expected the world to end created its most elaborate paper trail.

The Coming didn't come; Beissel died in 1768 and the celibate order dwindled — the last celibate member died in 1813, the Householders carried on as German Seventh Day Baptists until 1934. The Commonwealth took the buildings in 1941 — the Saron and Saal and the rest of the medieval-looking Germanic complex surviving in the middle of a Pennsylvania town as the most intact communal-society site in America.

Ephrata Cloister is the archive's vigil file — the 1732 community where eighty celibates slept on benches waiting for the Second Coming and produced America's largest colonial book, its first folk-art Fraktur, and a thousand hymns.