Conrad Beissel

(Christian Neff) - Johann Konrad Beissel, b. April 1690, at Eberbach in Baden, Germany, d. 6 July 1768, As a baker's journeyman he devoted himself to an exhaustive study of the Bible and the works of Jakob Böhme. He was converted in 1717.
In the late summer of 1720 he emigrated to America (first to Boston) with a group of fellow believers to escape persecution by church and temporal authorities. He was a "man of lively imagination, great energy, and inspiring eloquence, especially when the Spirit came upon him."
He went to Germantown, where he learned the weaver's trade for a year under Peter Becker, organizer of the Church of the Brethren, who also baptized him in 1722. He now assumed the name Friedsam Gottrecht.
After some time as a hermit at Mill Creek in Lebanon County and as the head of the "newly founded Dunker Church" of Conestoga in Lancaster County, he withdrew to solitude on the Cocalico Creek near Ephrata, and there established the Ephrata Cloister of the Seventh Day Baptists. Beissel was an outstanding though amateur musician, the composer of over 1,000 hymns, of which 441 were printed. Continued