“A Pleasant & Peaceful Village”: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Letters Relating to the Economy, Snow Hill, and Ephrata Societies

Among the papers of the Snow Hill Society recently deposited at Juniata College, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, are three letters pertaining to the Harmonist Society of Economy in present-day Ambridge, Pennsylvania.They begin with a visit paid to the communitarian society by a member of a comparable, but much smaller and less prosperous, contemporaneous community.Taken together with four related letters preserved in the Harmony Society Records (now in the Pennsylvania State Archives), they provide useful information on both communitarian groups, as well as some limited information about the Ephrata Society. 1 The Snow Hill Society, often called locally the "Nunnery," was a daughter colony of the famed Ephrata Society of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.The latter community had taken shape as a largely monastic body in the early 1730s under the brilliant if occasionally erratic leadership of Conrad Beissel (1691-1768), a native of the Electoral Palatinate in Germany. 2 The monks and nuns at Ephrata, evangelistic in temper, organized several offshoot colonies, few of which, however, were blessed with longevity.The major exception to this generalization was Snow Hill, founded in 1798 by members of the Snowberger/ Schneeberger family.Barbara Karper Snowberger (1746-1810) was the actual founder, aided reluctantly by her husband Andreas (1744-1825).It grew from a congregation of Dunkers (currently called Church of the Brethren) in the Antietam region.Its site was on the south edge of what is now Quincy, Pennsylvania, in Franklin County, several miles north of Waynesboro.Peter Lehman (1757-1823) was the first pastor.3 Though at its peak in the 1830s and 1840s Snow Hill never achieved a