Nick Siegert – Custodial Guide Supervisor, Ephrata Cloister

Research

I have long been interested in the history of the Mormon religion, but working at the Ephrata Cloister and researching its past has surprisingly re-sparked that interest. I have a special interest in a specific area of the early history of the Mormon Church. I have reason to believe that there may be a connection between the Ephrata Cloister and the early Mormon Church. The reason for this comes from a book by Jeff Bach, from the Elizabethtown Colleges’ Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies.  In 2002 , Dr. Bach, published “Voices of the Turtle Doves: The Sacred World of Ephrata”.  Dr. Bach makes the following claim: “Ephrata may have been the source for Mormon baptism for the dead.  The Whitmer family from the Ephrata area settled near Joseph Smith’s boyhood home and some joined his new movement.  Conrad Beissel, the founder of the Ephrata Cloister, also practiced baptism for the dead”. He doesn’t say anything else about it, but it a very interesting claim.

I suppose it is plausible. From my limited reading I gathered that Joseph Smith was intellectually omnivorous and freely combined ideas from a wide range of other frameworks into his own new worldview.   As sources for this claim, Bach sites two books: Michael Quinn’s, “Early Mormonism and the Magic World View”, and John L. Brooke’s, “The Refiners Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology”. I have read both of these books and both of them cite sources that place Peter Whitmer Sr. in the Ephrata Area at the time Ephrata was a viable community. I also read Richard L. Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling, for background information as well as the Fawn Brodie biography. I have also been in touch with participants in the Joseph Smith Papers Project, the Kirtland Temple, in Ohio, and the John Whitmer Historical Association in Missouri. All have offered guidance and suggestions. I am currently doing research on this subject with a paper in mind. I still have a good deal of reading and research to do on the topic. It would be fascinating if there was a connection between Ephrata and Joseph Smith, but it’s also possible there is no connection at all. In any case, the research and reading has been interesting and eye opening so far.

Discussion