The Dark Secrets of the Ephrata Cloister

 

Located in Lancaster County, the historic Ephrata Cloister and its museum are visited by hundreds of tourists each year. Founded as a religious colony in 1732 by Johann Conrad Beissel, members of this strict religious community adhered to the principles of the Schwarzenau Brethren (or German Baptist Brethren), which date back to the 1708, when Alexander Mack inspired his followers to break away from the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches of Germany. Driven out of the country by the established churches, the Brethren found exile in the Netherlands until 1719, when Peter Becker encouraged all but a handful to emigrate to Pennsylvania. By 1733, most of the Brethren had arrived in Germantown, near Philadelphia, and settled among the Mennonites.

One of the earliest of these arrivals was Conrad Beissel, who found that even the doctrine of the Schwarzenau Brethren was a bit too liberal for his liking. Upon his arrival in 1720 he intended to join the hermitage founded by Johannes Kelpius, the Transylvanian religious mystic who lived in a cave along Wissahickon Creek and preached that the world would end in 1694. Kelpius' movement lost much of its steam after his prophecy failed to come true, and Kelpius himself lost the rest of his steam entirely in 1708, when he died at the age of 40. This must've been quite a shock to his remaining followers, since Kelpius had often claimed to be immortal (he also claimed to possess the so-called Philosopher's Stone, which allowed alchemists to not only turn worthless materials into gold, but to achieve immortality; according to legend, Kelpius had lost his stone in the Schuylkill River, thereby offering an explanation for his seemingly-impossible death to his gullible followers). Kelpius was also an accomplished musician and author, which, in a way, kind of makes him one of America's first social media influencers.

In Germantown, Beissel earned his keep as a weaver's apprentice and struck up a friendship with one of Kelpius' former monks, Conrad Matthaei, and from the latter's settlement along Wissahickon Creek they took turns staying awake and watching the skies for the eminent second coming of Christ, as Kelpius had foretold (astrology would later become a key component of Beissel's religious beliefs*). Before long, Beissel had become disenfranchised by Matthaei and decided that it was probably more fun to be a cult leader than a cult follower and so he formed his own religious order along Cocalico Creek in Lancaster County and laid the framework for what would eventually become the Ephrata Cloister.

But this period of Beissel's life was not without controversy. In 1726, six years before the Cloister sprang into being, while Beissel was building a cult-like following throughout Chester and Lancaster Counties, two young daughters-- Anna and Maria Eicher-- ran away from their father's house and placed themselves under Beissel's guidance after being mesmerized by his preaching. These living arrangements created much gossip throughout the community, and to prevent any possible scandal the members of the congregation built a separate cabin for the two sisters, who became the first of Beissel's followers to adopt (perhaps against their wishes) the sort of monastic lifestyle for which the Cloister later became famous.

 

The Early Life of Conrad Beissel

Beissel, it seems, had a long and complicated history with the opposite sex, which perhaps formed his later opinions on celibacy. His father, said to be a drunkard of low moral quality, died before Conrad was born. He was raised by his mother until her death left him an orphan at the age of eight. As a ward of the state, Conrad was apprenticed to a baker when he reached working age, and it was under the tutelage of this master baker he learned how to play the violin. Young Conrad frequently accompanied his master to parties and dances, and soon gave up baking altogether to pursue his love of music-- and women-- full time. Historian Julius Friedrich Sachse wrote of Beissel: Being a comely youth, it was not long before he would rather fiddle at a wedding feast and turn a buxom damsel in the dance than need his dough or rake the oven.

According to Sachse, Beissel wandered throughout Germany learning the baking trade and eventually found himself in Manheim, where he entered the service of a baker named Kantebecker. Sachse continues: After remaining a time at Manheim he was forced to leave his master's house on account of some trouble with the latter's wife, whom he called a "Jezebel".

It was around this time the young man had a religious awakening; within a few years, he would find himself in America, extolling to his followers the virtues of celibacy and forbidding the use of musical instruments at his religious services. From Germantown he went to Berks County, Schuylkill County and Lancaster County, traveling from camp to camp with a dozen or so members of the German Brethren. Although he had been baptized in the Wissahickon by the Brethren (their fervor for baptism led to the label "Dunkers", which is still in use today), he felt that it didn't "take", and was later again re-baptized in Pequea Creek after he and his companions had splintered from the Dunker church. This second dunking seemed to do the trick, and before long Beissel found himself the elected leader of his congregation. His companions from this time would later become Elders of his religious order.
 

 

Camp of the Solitary

The colony founded by Conrad Beissel on Cocalico Creek in 1732 , initially known as the "Camp of the Solitary", included a convent for the women and a monastery for the men, as well as a communal meetinghouse called the Saal. The charismatic Beissel, who had since changed his name to Friedsam, ruled over his colony with absolute authority, dictating every aspect of the members' lives; they were forced to sleep on narrow wooden benches with wooden blocks for pillows (Beissel abhorred birds and detested anything made from feathers, so pillows and blankets were off-limits**), and they were limited to one vegetarian meal per day (meat was strictly forbidden except on Easter). Historian Edward Eggleston, in 1886, wrote of the reasoning behind Beissel's peculiar dietary restrictions:

He had forbidden all animal food. Not only was meat of evil tendency, but milk, he said, made the spirit heavy and narrow; butter and cheese produced similar disabilities; eggs excited the passions; honey made the eyes bright and the heart cheerful, but did not clear the voice for music. 

The members promptly went to be at 9:00 each night, with each member taking a two-hour shift to watch out for the coming of Christ. The members were expected to wear white robes, take a vow of celibacy, and spend their waking hours in prayer and physical labor. Even in death, members of his church could not escape his fanatical mandates; Beissel even had strict rules about how members of his congregation were to be buried.

In addition to his fanatical rules about food (the members' diet was primarily limited to buckwheat, cabbage, potatoes, turnips and fruit from the colony's orchard) Beissel even had strict rules about how his hymns were to be sung-- Beissel alone wrote and composed the hymns, which were to be sung (no musical instruments were allowed) using a series of "master" and "servant" notes, in a minor key, which, when sung together, created a peculiar, ominous harmony. It also served as a subliminal method intended to reinforce Herr Friedsam's position as absolute ruler of his quirky, private kingdom. 

Of Beissel's strict mandates concerning music, Eggleston writes: 

Most of the songs sung in the little building called Zion were written by him... songs in praise of the mystical marriage of virgins with the chaste Lamb; songs about the Philadelphian brotherhood of saints (here Philadelphia refers to a mystical city of pure joy, a common theme in Beissel's teachings), about the divine Sophia (a celestial wise being about whom Beissel also preached), and about many other things which no man can understand, I am sure, until he has first purified himself from the gross humors of the flesh by a heavenly diet of turnips and spring water.

In his 1899 history of the German Brethren in Pennsylvania, author Julius Friedrich Sachse of Ephrata described Beissel's behavior shortly after taking being elected head of the congregation:

Beissel in his addresses now frequently introduced some of the mystic speculations of occult theosophy, which most of his simple-minded hearers failed to comprehend. The effect of this was that, while some of them deemed him inspired, others shook their heads sadly and thought him demented.

While historians are tempted to idealize the Ephrata Cloister as a utopian commune comprised of quiet, pious and industrious Christian vegetarians, the reality is that the Cloister was not much different than a prison camp and that Beissel was not much different than any other charismatic cult leader throughout history who imposed his strange whims upon a group of vulnerable people through methods of psychological manipulation (sleep and food deprivation, physical discomfort, celibacy, subliminal messaging, deprivation of medical care, etc.). Continual physical labor in a collective environment does wonders to discourage individual thought, and there was no shortage of work around the Cloister. Members were required to engage in carpentry, farming, operation of the printing press, and manufacturing of paper, furniture and clothing-- very much the same industries one finds in a modern-day penitentiary or prison farm. 

Historian Eggleston, who was also an ordained Methodist minister, was perhaps one of the earliest critics of Beissel's mind-control methods. Eggleston writes:

Their perfection of execution was attained at a cost almost too great. Brother Friedsam was a fanatic, and he was also an artist. He obliged the brethren and sisters to submit to the most rigorous training. In this, as in religion, he subordinated them to his ideals. He would fine tune their very souls to his own key... At the singing school Brother Friedsam could not abide the least defect; he rated roundly the brother or sister who made any mistake... if it is ever necessary to account for bad temper in musicians, one might suggest that the water-gruel diet had impaired his temper and theirs.

Like many radical religious leaders before and after, Beissel soon realized that celibacy was not a very good way of ensuring the long-term viability of his colony. Not only was it a lousy selling point for the recruitment of new members, but it limited the lifespan of the religious order to one's own lifespan. By the early 1750s, membership had dwindled to less than a hundred celibate vegans and Beissel remedied the situation by extending membership to about two hundred non-celibate "Householders", who occupied adjoining homes and farms and who were invited to join in worship at the Cloister. They soon came to adopt Beissel as their spiritual leader, and this ensured the colony's survival until the death of the last celibate member in 1813, some forty-five years after the death of Conrad Beissel. After 1813 the members of the religious order were incorporated into the German Seventh Day Baptist Church, though religious services were conducted at the Cloister until its closure in 1934. The last surviving resident of the Cloister, Marie Kachel Bucher, passed away in 2008 at the age of 98. 

Beissel, who died in 1768, is buried in the Ephrata Cloister Cemetery along with nearly three hundred of his followers and Householders, and a plaque at his gravesite (translated from German) reads:

Here rests offspring of the love of God, Friedsam, a Solitary, but later became leader, guardian and teacher of Solitary and of the Congregation in Christ in and about Ephrata. Born at Eberbach in the Palatinate, called Conrad Beissel, fell asleep July 6th, anno 1768; Aged according to his spiritual age 52 years, but according to his natural, 77 years and 4 months.

 

 

 The Colony of Misery?

Many of the gravemarkers at the Cloister cemetery are excellently preserved, and these markers offer valuable insight into conditions inside the colony. A casual stroll through the old graveyard reveals the final resting place of an astonishing number of church members who failed to survive into middle age, and a few who made it to old age. There are 240 gravemarkers in which both the birth and death dates of the deceased are inscribed, with the average age at the time of death being a mere 50.96 years. One might be tempted to say, "Well, life expectancy was shorter back then, so that's not unusual", but this does not explain why the age-at-time-of-death average seems to drop precipitously after the Brethren arrived in Ephrata.

This average age at time of death is bolstered by a score of followers who survived to an age that is enviable even by today's standards. These deceased followers include: Johan Diedrich Fahnestock, age 79 (b. 1696), Joseph Heffley, age 80 (b. 1727), Salma Heffley, age 79 (b. 1727), Ludwig Hocker, 74 (b. 1717), Anna Magdalena Klopp, 76 (b. 1690), Johann Peter Klopp, 87 (b. 1686), Elisabeth Keller, 79 (b. 1708), Hans Jacob Keller, 87 (b. 1706), Anna Catarina Lassle, 94 (b. 1652), Sebastian Keller, 77 (b. 1729) Barbara Rohrbach, 86 (b. 1708), and Peter "Brother Jabez" Miller, 86 (b. 1709), who succeeded Beissel as leader of the community.

What do these people have in common? Well, for starters, they were all living during Beissel's lifetime and were not born inside the walls of the colony. Most had already reached adulthood before the Cloister was founded in 1732. If you subtract these early followers, this lowers the age of the typical Cloister member at their time of death to well under 50. You can also subtract the oldest person buried in the graveyard (Lydia Miller Konigmacher, age 96), because she lived in a stone mansion between Ephrata and Springville and never lived inside the Cloister. So why should the early followers who were born and raised outside of Ephrata live to a respectable average age of 83 years, while those who were born inside the Cloister only have a life expectancy of 49 years? That's a whopping difference.

What killed Orion Addams at the age of 23? How could it be that, out of the three Benjamin Baumans buried there, none survived past the age of 44? Why was George Gorgas only 24 when he died? What manner of death befell Henry Huber and Henry Hahn at the age of 13? Why did a man in the prime of his life like Michael Sensaman perish at 22? Or a man at the height of his vigor like Joseph Sensaman die at 24? Had there been a war going on at the times of their deaths, we might attribute the death to Confederate shells or British bullets... but there wasn't. In fact, none of the church members had served in the military (although taking up arms was against church teachings, the Cloister buildings were in fact used as a military hospital during the Revolutionary War after the Battle of Germantown).

How did Samuel Slough and Sarah Slough both die at 4 years of age? If there was an outbreak of scarlet fever or some other disease which swept through the colony, we might blame it on that... but they died ten years apart. In fact, it seems that the residents of Beissel's utopia were fairly well-protected against epidemics; during the outbreak years of the scarlet fever (1858), typhoid fever (1906-1907) and the three major cholera waves (1832, 1849, and 1866), the Cloister Cemetery saw just 8 total burials. If war and disease were not the culprits behind the overwhelming proportion of untimely deaths at the Cloister, then what was? One can only conclude that the Ephrata Cloister was not the quaint, lovely place romanticized by white-robed tour guides, or the enterprising enclave mentioned in history books. The state can put up all the misleading historical markers it likes, but the reality could only have been this: Life at the Cloister was dreadfully harsh and short. It was less of a utopia and more of a hell on earth, where malnutrition, abuse and neglect ran rampant.

 

Conrad Beissel's grave

 

Proof of this can be seen when comparing the average age at time of death at the Cloister Cemetery with the average of other nearby cemeteries of the same period. These burial grounds contain the remains of people of the same Palatinate heritage, who lived in the same geographical region in Lancaster County at approximately the same time. Why should one vary so greatly from the others? For instance, by calculating the average age at time of death from other nearby cemeteries, we can see that while the average at the Cloister Cemetery is 50.96 years, the average for the Gross Cemetery in Ephrata is 68.9 years, the German Reformed Church Cemetery (Strasburg) is 59.1 years, and the Dornbach Cemetery (Cocalico) is 56.95 years. Again, these figures are based upon only the gravemarkers which show a legible birth and death date.

One might be tempted to blame this discrepancy on stillbirths or infant deaths, but, not surprisingly, only a few infant deaths occurred inside a colony whose members were known for celibacy; by my count, I've found only 4 persons buried at the Cloister who passed away in the first few weeks of life. More infants are buried at the aforementioned graveyards than at the Cloister cemetery, which suggests that it was the young adult at the Cloister who suffered the most. 

 Of course, one should not hold Beissel entirely accountable for conditions inside the Cloister. The cemetery burials show that his original "brothers" and "sisters" who were born outside the colony enjoyed long, healthy lives. Upon Beissel's death, when the reins were handed over to Peter Miller-- "Brother Jabez"-- the members also continued to survive to an admirable age. However, in the decades following Miller's death, we see a dramatic shift in life expectancy. Inside the Cloister graveyard we find the burials of: 35 children under the age of ten, eight teenagers, sixteen persons aged 20-29, and nineteen persons between the ages of 30 and 39.***

Skeptics may point out that not all burials at the graveyard were those of Cloister members and that the "Householders" who are buried there were prone to farming and industrial accidents. This is true, but of course the same thing applies to other local cemeteries, where the majority of interments are also farmers and laborers. In fact, you'll find members of the very same families in the other burial grounds I've sampled, names like Bauman, Bucher, Fahnestock, Konigmacher and Zerfass. This would also exclude the possibility of a "heriditary taint" being the cause of the Cloister's premature deaths, since the same maladies would affect the same families regardless of burial place.

 

Grave of Sophia Bauman

 

The Exhumation of Sophia Bauman

It is well established that Beissel imbued his religious "society of solitude" with his own unique brand of occult mysticism and superstition (In Germantown, Beissel had joined the secret society of the Rosicrucian Order*, and historian Sachse writes of a "Brother Jephune" who served as Beissel's chief astrologer at the Cloister), and it has been written that Beissel's preaching was especially effective on the ignorant and simple-minded. One demonstration of the typical scientific ignorance and superstition that was rampant at the Cloister took place in 1743, with the passing of a comet which Beissel heralded as an omen of destruction (it wasn't).

More than a century later, the residents of the Cloister demonstrated their primitive superstitions again with the gruesome exhumation of a woman whose death, according to some members of Beissel's church, was caused by supernatural forces.  

On Sunday, May 24, 1857, the people of Ephrata were startled to learn that the remains of Sophia Bauman, who had died of consumption in 1850 at the age of 32, had been exhumed from the Cloister Cemetery by two men hired by the congregation. For the God-fearing residents of Ephrata, desecrating a grave on Sunday was a horrific thing; but since the Brethren believed that the true Sabbath was on Saturday (hence their designation as "Seventh Day Baptists"), those at the Cloister did not take offense at their neighbors being offended.

One newspaper correspondent from the Lancaster Express traveled the short distance to Ephrata to gather news about the strange exhumation, and learned that since Sophia Bauman's death, two other sisters, two brothers and the mother had also died prematurely, presumably from the same disease. While local physicians were strongly of the opinion that the Bauman clan had all been stricken by tuberculosis, those at the Cloister pinned the blame on the old German superstition of the "winding-sheet".

In traditional Orthodox Jewish and Muslim burials, the deceased is wrapped in a white shroud made of cotton or linen prior to burial (the Shroud of Turin is the world's most famous example of a winding-sheet). At one time this custom was also popular with the early Christian church, though had fallen out of favor by the end of the Dark Ages. However, since Beissel's theology was heavily influenced by Mosiac Law*, members of his church were also wrapped in a winding-sheet prior to burial. According to a strange and outdated legend, if a portion of the burial shroud should find itself inside the mouth of the deceased, the surviving family members would be "sucked" into the grave, too. One newspaper account of the Bauman exhumation, from the Lewistown Gazette, stated:

The opinions of physicians were set aside by the incursions of ignorance and superstition, under which the belief was seriously entertained and acted upon, that by some hocus pocus the winding sheet of the corpse had got into her mouth, and that by a continual suction (the modus operandi of which was only known to the spirits) she had actually drawn the other five members of the family after her, and unless this winding sheet was speedily removed from the mouth of the corpse she would, in like manner, cause the premature death of the whole connection... Incredible as a belief in such a monstrous superstition in this enlightened age may appear, it is nevertheless true; for according to previous arrangements, the resurrectionists commenced operations on Sunday morning. 

Of course, the digging up of Sophia Bauman was in vain-- not only was the burial shroud not inside the corpse's mouth, but the Cloisterers had overlooked the fact that most of the winding sheet, being of organic material, had rotted away years earlier. It seems the corpse was reburied and the incident was never spoken of again.

Sadly, one cannot feel sympathy for the poor, deluded folks who called the Cloister home, who toiled in labor and suffered in solitude and kept a constant eye turned toward the night sky for comets, shooting stars, and other portentous omens which their zealous leader, Conrad Beissel, assured them would foretell the coming of Christ. And one cannot wonder if many of those followers, whose lives were dramatically shortened by malnutrition and lack of faith in modern medicine, would have been better off eschewing silly superstitions and occult mysticism for a normal life outside the walls of the Cloister.

 

Source Material/Further Reading:

*The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania: 1708-1742. Julius Friedrich Sachse, Ephrata. 1899.
**The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania: 1742-1800. Julius Friedrich Sachse, Ephrata. 1899.
***Statistics calculated from publicly accessible information on Findagrave.com.
Lancaster Intelligencer, April 7, 1886.
Lewistown Gazette, June 11, 1857.
Lancaster Express, May 27, 1857.