Who Were the Separatists?
Bimeler cabin
Fear of the authorities runs deep for the people who called themselves Separatists. And no wonder.
King Frederick II came to the throne in 1806 in Wurttemberg, Germany and promptly abolished the constitution, taxed the inhabitants mercilessly, forced them to fight in unwinnable wars, and heaped cruel punishments on dissenters.
All the while, the Lutheran church kept silent. And, in 19th century Germany, the church and the state were one. That is, all schools and churches were Lutheran; public schools free of religion didn't exist.
So when a small group of believers declined to send their children to school, refused to fight for the king, and held religious services in their homes, they were punished. How? Let me count the ways!
They were forcibly taken to church services.
Their children were taken away and placed in orphanages.
Their property was confiscated and they were thrown out into the street.
They were imprisoned in dungeons, flogged, and forced to work at hard labor.
Finally, in 1817 Joseph Bimeler (my distant grandfather), with the help of Quakers in England and Philadelphia, led 300 courageous believers across the Atlantic to the New World. They called themselves the Society of Separatists because they'd separated from the Lutheran church (no offense to today's Lutherans!) and named their village Zoar for the place where Lot found sanctuary just as they did in America. Shortly after arriving in the then-wilderness, they realized that many of the women and older people couldn't survive on their own so they decided to become communal, combining and sharing their assets from that day forward.
In a few short years these hard-working settlers had tamed the wilderness into productive agricultural farmland, built homes and established businesses—a flour mill, saw mill, wool factory, iron furnaces, tannery, foundry, garden, hotel, and livery. For themselves, they built a sewing house, weaving house, bakery, cobbler shop, blacksmith shop, cabinet shop, dairy, barns, and store. When they completed the seven miles of the Ohio Canal that came through their land, they paid off their mortgage with the proceeds.
Their success was due in large part to their early period of celibacy that freed the women (who outnumbered men two to one) to work alongside the men. After marriage was again allowed and children were born, once more they needed the women's help in the fields and shops. Later, to free the women from childrearing, they established dormitories to house the children, who lived in them from the age of three until fourteen when they left to become apprentices to whatever work they were assigned. The children never returned home again.
Thus, the Society prospered, selling their goods up and down the Ohio Canal, and attracting wealthy visitors from nearby Canton and Cleveland to their hotel and traders to their Canal Inn. But their very success was also their downfall, bringing the outside world into their sheltered community.
Later, the civil war divided the settlers. The younger men, like other German immigrants, fought for the Union, violating the community's pacifist beliefs. Then the railroad brought more visitors and the industrial revolution made their hand-made goods obsolete. Finally, in 1898, the Society disbanded, dividing the property among the remaining members. Zoar remains an active historical village today.
But all was not perfect in this Garden of Eden. Why? Joseph Bimeler, who was both their secular and religious leader, kept tight control over the community, even retaining the deed to their entire property—more than 5000 acres—in his own name. A woman in Philadelphia was so incensed by his behavior that she warned her fellow Quakers about him. "Bimeler," she said, "has so infatuated them that they look on him as another Moses." So, as time passed, the Society soon became just as rigid and just as authoritarian and just as restrictive as the religion they had fled.
This is when my stories begin.
