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.
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