The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

by H.W. Brands

Most of the Germans were sober and industrious, yet some displayed an unsettling religious enthusiasm. A millennial sect of German Pietists known as the “Society of the Woman in the Wilderness” built—or dug—a communistic colony in caves above Wissahickon Creek, not far from Philadelphia, where they ascetically awaited the Second Coming. Another group, led by Johann Conrad Beissel, established a frontier village of the godly at Ephrata, near the Susquehanna River some fifty miles west of Philadelphia. The core of Beissel’s sect was the “Spiritual Order of the Solitary,” forty men who devoted themselves to a rigorous regimen of work, fasting, and prayer. Although avowedly celibate, the Ephratans admitted women, who enrolled in the “Order of Spiritual Virgins.”