We spent a rainy day at Ephrata Cloister. Picture booklets and ebooks will be available soon on Amazon.
In 1732 Conrad Beissel founded Ephrata Cloister, now twenty-eight acres right off of West Main Street in Lancaster County, Ephrata, Pennsylvania. Beissel was a hermit seeking religious freedom and believed in the Second Coming which he thought would lead to a spiritual oneness with God.
The cloister served as a Revolutionary War hospital tending to two-hundred-and-sixty soldiers some of whom rest in nearby Mount Zion Cemetery, which has just been placed at the top of my to-do list.
Conrad Beissel passed away on July 6, 1768 at the age of seventy-eight. The community never quite recovered. The last chaste member died in 1813, they are buried in a peaceful cemetery on the grounds. It became a Baptist church afterwards until 1934. In 1941 the Pennsylvania Historic Museum Commission assumed responsibility and you can tour the grounds and shop at the museum shop which is loaded with charming homemade local crafts and music. I got some paper dolls and an owl finger puppet who I’ve named Conrad. He will become a wise hymnast in my current doll soap O, My Ra!
Ron got some homemade lemon chocolate. It’s good. I got a couple of fraktur choral manuscript postcards too. Afterwards we ate at The Lincoln House. I had a vegetable bowl and an apple pear sangria, very nice. They have an Apple Dumpling Festival in the Autumn and a Christmas concert. We’ll be back, and I’ll probably pick up a cd and more. They sell the redware dishes like we got from Cornwall Furnace for the dollhouses, same artist I’m sure. My paper dolls are Pennsyvania German 1765-1800 by Jan Wood Zimmerman, 1988. The cloister is worth a visit for the shop alone.
