Conrad Beissel

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Johann Conrad Beissel (April, 1690 - July 6, 1768) was the German-born religious leader who in 1732 founded the Ephrata Community in Pennsylvania.

Beissel was born in Eberbach in Germany, and came to Pennsylvania in 1720. In 1732 he established a semi-monastic community (the Camp of the Solitary) with a convent (the Sister House) and a monastery (the Brother House) at Ephrata, in what is now Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The orders were celibate. Other believing families settled near the community, accepted Beissel as their spiritual leader and worshipped with them on the Sabbath. Beissel served as the community's composer as well as spiritual leader, and devised his own system of musical composition that was intended to simplify radically the process by relying on pre-determined sequences of "master notes" and "servant notes" to create harmony, which was mentioned in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus as a kind of precursor to serialism. Beissel 's colony was noted for its printing facilities. However the utopian community declined in population after the Revolution.