The following is a scan of bad xerox that cousin Oby Bonawit had taken from his Collier Encyclopdia. His reasoning for sending this document was that, Conrad Weiser, mentioned below was Adam Bonnawitz's neighbor and sold property to Adam on which he and his family lived for a number of years. The same property shown on the map on page 2.

EPHRATA CLOISTER, THE, a cloistered community established in Pennsylvania for Seventh-Day Baptist men and women of the Colonial Period by Johann Conrad Beissel, a Pietist born in Eberbach, Germany, in 1690. Because of his peculiar mystical and Sabbatarian views Beissel was obliged to leave Germany in 1720 and came to America in the same year, first settling in Germantown, then in Muehibach. In 1732 he organized his first simple group at Ephrata on the Cocalico, then known to the Indians as the Koch-Halekung or Den of Serpents. Scores of men and women became enamored of this religious life, which was so strange to the American scene, and joined Beissel who was now called Brother Friedsam; even Conrad Weiser, the famed Indian interpreter and colonial agent for Penn, was a member of the group for several years. The community erected its own mill, printing press, and school and conducted the first sabbath school a generation before Robert Raikes' School of 1780.

Between 1745 and 1800 about two hundred books were printed in Ephrata. One, the most monumental work to come from a Colonial press, was The Martyr's Mirror by the Mennonite, J.V.T. Braght; it was printed at Ephrata in 1748-1749 on paper made at Ephrata and was bound in the Ephrata bindery. The first music printed in America was also done in this community, and many of the most beautifully illuminated writings of the Colonial Era were produced there.

After Beissel's death Peter Miller, a scholar and linguist who translated the Declaration of Independence into seven European languages and was known as Brother Jabez, took over the leadership of the colony. It survived well into the nineteenth century as a community and lasted as a congregation of the Seventh-Day Baptist Church until the State of Pennsylvania took over the property. It has recently been restored as a state shrine.