in America and one of the few to survive to the present century.  Though in 1900 the community numbered only seventeen members, in its prime while Beissel was yet alive it sheltered three hundred, owned a prosperous paper mill, a grist mill, an oil mill, a fulling mill, a printing press, a schoolhouse, dwellings for the married members, and large dormitories for the celibates.  The meeting-house was built entirely without metal, following literally the precedent of Solomon, who built his temple “so that there was neither hammer nor ax nor any tool of iron heard in the house while it was building.”  Wooden pegs took the place of nails, and the laths were fastened laboriously into grooves.  Averse to riches, Beissel’s people refused gifts from William Penn, King George III, and other prominent personages.  The pious Beissel was a very capable leader, with a passion for music and an ardor for simplicity.  He instituted among the unmarried members of the community a celibate order embracing both sexes, and he reduced the communal life of both the religious and secular members to a routine of piety and labor.  The society was known, even in England, for the excellence of its paper, for the good workmanship of its printing press, and especially for the quality of its music, which was composed largely by Beissel.  His chorals were among the first composed and sung in America.  His school, too, was of such quality that it drew pupils from Baltimore and Philadelphia.  After his death in 1786, in his seventy-second year, his successor tried for twenty-eight years to maintain the discipline and distinction of the order.  It was eventually deemed prudent to incorporate the society under the laws of the State and to entrust its management to a board of trustees, and the cloistered life of the community became a memory.

A community patterned after Ephrata was founded in 1800 by Peter Lehman at Snow Hill, in Franklin County, Pennsylvania.  It consisted of some forty German men and women living in cloisters but relieving the monotony of their toil and the rigor of their piety with music.  As in Ephrata, there was a twofold membership, the consecrated and the secular.  The entire community, however, vanished after the death of its founder.

When Beissel’s Ephrata was in its heyday, the Moravians, under the patronage of Count Zinzendorf of Saxony, established in 1741 a community on the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania, named Bethlehem in token of their humility.  The colony provided living and working quarters for both the married and unmarried members.  After about twenty years of experimenting, the communistic regimen was abandoned.  Bethlehem, however, continued to thrive, and its schools and its music became widely known.