Note 53 — EPHRATA.
Reading edition
These remarkable men seem to deserve especial notice. In Rupp’s History of Lancaster County it is stated that they were from Germany, and had been brought up Catholics. Israel Eckerlin (Brother Onesimus) became prior of the brother-house at Ephrata. Peter Miller, in an original letter, complains that he obliged them to meddle with worldly things further than their obligations permitted; and that when money came in it was put out at interest, “contrary to our principles.”
They could not, however, have been very rich, for when in 1745 a bell arrived in Philadelphia, from England, which had been ordered by Eckerlin, and which cost eighty pounds, they knew not how to pay for it. The name of Onesimus (or Eckerlin) had been placed upon the bell. When the news of its arrival was received, a council was held in the presence of the spiritual father, Beissel, and it was concluded to break the bell to pieces and bury it in the earth. The next morning, however, the father appeared in the council, and said that he had reflected that as the brothers were poor, the bell should be pardoned. It therefore was sold, and was placed upon the Lutheran church in Lancaster, where it was long in use. Afterwards it was sold to a fire company, and is now on the tower of the house of the Washington Company. It bears a Latin inscription with the name of the “reverend man,” Onesimus.
Miller says that the prior (Eckerlin) conceived a notion to make himself independent of Beissel, and was stripped of all his dignities.
The Eckerlins appear to have gone into the wilderness, and encamped on a creek flowing into the Monongahela, in Pennsylvania, to which stream they gave the name of Dunkard Creek, which it still bears. They afterward seem to have removed to Dunkards’ Bottom, on Cheat River, which they made their permanent residence. After many vicissitudes, Miller tells us that Eckerlin and his brother were taken prisoners by Mohawks, and sold to Quebec, whence they were transported to France, “where, after our prior had received the tonsure and become a friar of their church, they both died.” The Ephrata Chronicle says (chap. xxiii.) that the prior went out of time twenty years before Beissel. The latter died in 1768. By the former reckoning, the prior went out of time in 1748, or about three years after the difficulty about the bell at Ephrata.