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In 1643, New Sweden Governor Johan Björnsson Printz established Fort Nya Gothenburg, the first European settlement in Pennsylvania, on Tinicum Island.330Mil BC - The body impressions of salamander-like creatures, estimated to be 330 million years old, were later found in sandstone rocks collected in eastern Pennsylvania and stored in the museum in Reading, Pa. (AP, 10/30/07) 10,000 BC - Paleo-Indian Era (Stone Age culture) the earliest human inhabitants of America who lived in caves and were Nomadic hunters of large game including the Great Mammoth and giant bison. 7000 BC - Archaic Period in which people built basic shelters and made stone weapons and stone tools 1000 AD - Woodland Period - homes were established along rivers and trade exchange systems and burial systems were established 1688 - 1763 - The French and Indian Wars between France and Great Britain for lands in North America consisting of King William's War (1688-1699), Queen Anne's War (1702-1713), King George's War (1744 - 1748) and the French and Indian War aka the Seven Years War (1754-1763) 1754 - 1763 - The French Indian War is won by Great Britain against the French so ending the series of conflicts known as the French and Indian Wars 1763-1675 - Pontiac's Rebellion, Chief Pontiac's tries to force British out of the West, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania. 1763 - Treaty of Paris 1774 -,Lord Dunmore's War. Governor Dunmore commanded a force to defeat the Shawnee, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio, down the Ohio River.The Indigenous People of Pennsylvania

The names of the Pennsylvania tribes included the Lenapi Delaware, Erie, Honniasont, Iroquois, Saponi, Shawnee, Susquehanna, Tuscarora, Tutelo and Wenrohronon.

Native Americans lived in the area that became Pennsylvania hundreds of years before European settlers entered the region. The two primary groups were the Algonkian and Iroquois. Algonkian tribes included the Delaware, Nanticoke, and Shawnee. The Susquehannocks were an Iroquoian tribe that lived along the Susquehanna River.

These early inhabitants traveled by canoe or on foot. They lived in houses made of bark and wore clothing from the skins of animals. Arts such as pottery making and weaving were also practiced. Although some farming was done, most food was acquired through hunting and gathering.

When first discovered by Europeans, Pennsylvania, like the rest of the continent, was inhabited by groups of American Indians, people of Mongoloid ancestry unaware of European culture. The life of the Indians reflected Stone Age backgrounds, especially in material arts and crafts. Tools, weapons and household equipment were made from stone, wood, and bark. Transportation was on foot or by canoe. Houses were made of bark, clothing from the skins of animals. The rudiments of a more complex civilization were at hand in the arts of weaving, pottery, and agriculture, although hunting and food gathering prevailed. Some Indians formed confederacies such as the League of the Five Nations, which was made up of certain New York-Pennsylvania groups of Iroquoian speech. The other large linguistic group in Pennsylvania was the Algonkian, represented by the Delawares, Shawnees, and other tribes. The Delawares, calling themselves Leni-Lenape or "real men," originally occupied the basin of the Delaware River and were the most important of several tribes that spoke an Algonkian language. Under the pressure of white settlement, they began to drift westward to the Wyoming Valley, to the Allegheny and, finally, to eastern Ohio. Many of them took the French side in the French and Indian War, joined in Pontiac's War, and fought on the British side in the Revolutionary War. Afterward, some fled to Ontario and the rest wandered west. Their descendants now live on reservations in Oklahoma and Ontario. The Munsees were a division of the Delawares, who lived on the upper Delaware River, above the Lehigh River. The Susquehannocks were a powerful Iroquoian-speaking tribe who lived along the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania and Maryland. An energetic people living in Algonkian-speaking tribes' territory, they engaged in many wars. In the end, they fell victim to new diseases brought by European settlers, and to attacks by Marylanders and by the Iroquois, which destroyed them as a nation by 1675. A few descendants were among the Conestoga Indians who were massacred in 1763 in Lancaster County. The Shawnees were an important Algonkian-speaking tribe who came to Pennsylvania from the west in the 1690s, some groups settling on the lower Susquehanna and others with the Munsees near Easton. In the course of time they moved to the Wyoming Valley and the Ohio Valley, where they joined other Shawnees who had gone there directly. They were allies of the French in the French and Indian War and of the British in the Revolution, being almost constantly at war with settlers for forty years preceding the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. After Wayne's victory at Fallen Timbers (1794), they settled near the Delawares in Indiana, and their descendants now live in Oklahoma. The Iroquois Confederacy of Iroquoian-speaking tribes, at first known as the Five Nations, included the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. After about 1723 when the Tuscaroras from the South were admitted to the confederacy, it was called the Six Nations. The five original tribes, when first known to Europeans, held much of New York State from Lake Champlain to the Genesee River. From this central position they gradually extended their power. As middlemen in the fur trade with the western Indians, as intermediaries skilled in dealing with the whites, and as the largest single group of Indians in northeastern America, they gained influence over Indian tribes from Illinois and Lake Michigan to the eastern seaboard. During the colonial wars their alliance or their neutrality was eagerly sought by both the French and the British. The Senecas, the westernmost tribe, established villages on the upper Allegheny in the 1730s. Small groups of Iroquois also scattered westward into Ohio and became known as Mingoes. During the Revolution, most of the Six Nations took the British side, but the Oneidas and many Tuscaroras were pro-American. Gen. John Sullivan's expedition up the Susquehanna River and Gen. Daniel Brodhead's expedition up the Allegheny River laid waste to their villages and cornfields in 1779 and disrupted their society. Many who had fought for the British moved to Canada alter the Revolution, but the rest worked out peaceful relations with the United States under the leadership of such chiefs as Cornplanter. The General Assembly recognized this noted chief by granting him a tract of land on the upper Allegheny in 1791. Other Tribes, which cannot be identified with certainty, occupied western Pennsylvania before the Europeans arrived, but were eliminated by wars and diseases in the 17th century, long before the Delawares, Shawnees and Senecas began to move there. The Eries, a great Iroquoian-speaking tribe, lived along the south shore of Lake Erie, but were wiped out by the Iroquois about 1654. The Mahicans, an Algonkian-speaking tribe related to the Mohegans of Connecticut, lived in the upper Hudson Valley of New York but were driven out by pressure from the Iroquois and from the white settlers, some joining the Delawares in the Wyoming Valley about 1730 and some settling at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Two Algonkian-speaking tribes, the Conoys and the Nanticokes, moved northward from Maryland early in the 18th century, settling in southern New York, and eventually moved west with the Delawares, with whom they merged. The Saponis, Siouan-speaking tribes from Virginia and North Carolina, moved northward to seek Iroquois protection and were eventually absorbed into the Cayugas. In the latter part of the 18th century there were temporary villages of Wyandots, Chippewas, Missisaugas, and Ottawas in western Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania colony was one of the 13 original British colonies that became the United States of America. It was founded in 1682 by the English Quaker William Penn.

Escape From European Persecution In 1681, William Penn, a Quaker, was given a land grant from King Charles II, who owed money to Penn's deceased father. Immediately, Penn sent his cousin William Markham to the territory to take control of it and be its governor. Penn's goal with Pennsylvania was to create a colony that allowed for freedom of religion. The Quakers were among the most radical of the English Protestant sects that had sprung up in the 17th century. Penn sought a colony in America—what he called a "holy experiment"—to protect himself and fellow Quakers from persecution.

When Markham arrived on the western shore of the Delaware River, however, he found that the region was already inhabited by Europeans. Part of present-day Pennsylvania was actually included in the territory named New Sweden that had been founded by Swedish settlers in 1638. This territory was then surrendered to the Dutch in 1655 when Peter Stuyvesant sent a large force to invade. Swedes and Finns continued to arrive and settle in what would become Pennsylvania.

Arrival of William Penn In 1682, William Penn arrived in Pennsylvania on a ship called the "Welcome." He quickly instituted the First Frame of Government and created three counties: Philadelphia, Chester, and Bucks. When he called a General Assembly to meet in Chester, the assembled body decided that the Delaware counties should be joined with those of Pennsylvania and that the governor would preside over both areas. It would not be until 1703 that Delaware would separate itself from Pennsylvania. In addition, the General Assembly adopted the Great Law, which provided for the liberty of conscience in terms of religious affiliations.

By 1683, the Second General Assembly created the Second Frame of Government. Any Swedish settlers were to become English subjects, seeing that the English were now in a majority in the colony.

Pennsylvania During the American Revolution Pennsylvania played an extremely important role in the American Revolution. The First and Second Continental Congresses were convened in Philadelphia. This is where the Declaration of Independence was written and signed. Numerous key battles and events of the war occurred in the colony, including the crossing of the Delaware River, the Battle of Brandywine, the Battle of Germantown, and the winter encampment at Valley Forge. The Articles of Confederation were also drafted in Pennsylvania, the document that formed the basis of the new Confederation that was created at the end of the Revolutionary War.

Significant Events In 1688, the first written protest against slavery in North America was created and signed by the Quakers in Germantown. In 1712, the slave trade was outlawed in Pennsylvania. The colony was well-advertised, and by 1700 it was the third-biggest and the richest colony in the New World. Penn allowed for a representative assembly elected by landowners. Freedom of worship and religion was granted to all citizens. In 1737, Benjamin Franklin was named the postmaster of Philadelphia. Before this, he had set up his own printing shop and started publishing "Poor Richard's Almanack." In the following years, he was named the first president of the Academy, performed his famous electricity experiments, and was an important figure in the fight for American independence. Sources Frost, J.W. "William Penn's Experiment in the Wilderness: Promise and Legend." The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 107, no. 4, October 1983, pp. 577-605. Schwartz, Sally. "William Penn and Toleration: Foundations of Colonial Pennsylvania." Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, October 1983, pp. 284-312. Pennsylvania Colony Facts The Pennsylvania Colony was one of the 13 original colonies in America. These 13 colonies were divided into three regions which included the New England Colonies, the Middle Colonies, and the Southern Colonies. The Pennsylvania Colony was one of four Middle Colonies which also included the New York Colony, the Delaware Colony, and the New Jersey Colony. The Pennsylvania Colony was founded by William Penn and others in 1682. The Pennsylvania Colony was named by King Charles II after William Penn's father Admiral Sir William Penn, and the Latin word meaning woodland - Sylvania. Together Sylvania and Penn form the name Pennsylvania, which stood for Penn's Woods. Interesting Pennsylvania Colony Facts: The land that became the Pennsylvania Colony had been in dispute for many years by the English, Dutch, and the Swedes. The Pennsylvania Colony was also called the Province of Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Colony was dominated by the Quaker religious beliefs and values. However there was still religious freedom for other beliefs. The reason for founding the Pennsylvania Colony was based on religious beliefs. The reason that King George II gave William Penn such a large area in the New World was because he owed William's father a large amount of money. The Pennsylvania Colony included immigrants from England, German, Scotch-Irish, and African Americans. The Pennsylvania Colony was on good terms with the Native Americans. There was an unsworn treaty in place that was never broken. The Quakers never helped the New Englanders during the Indian Wars. The Pennsylvania Colony's landscape included mountains, coastal plains, and plateaus and land suitable for farming. Natural resources in the Pennsylvania Colony included iron ore, coal, furs, forest, and farmland. The Pennsylvania Colony exported iron ore and manufactured iron products to England, including tools, plows, kettles, nails and other items. Major agriculture in the Pennsylvania Colony included livestock, wheat, corn, and dairy. Manufacturing in the Pennsylvania Colony included shipbuilding, textiles, and papermaking. The Pennsylvania Colony grew hemp, flax, rye, which were important for industry. The Pennsylvania Colony's major cities included York, Lancaster, and Philadelphia. Famous colonists who lived in Pennsylvania included Benjamin Franklin (Founding Father), Thomas McKean (signer of Declaration of Independence and 2nd Governor of Pennsylvania), Robert Morris (Financier of the Revolution), Thomas Paine (invented the phrase 'United States of America'), Arthur St. Clair (judge and general), James Wilson (lawyer and signer of Declaration of Independence), and Peggy Shippen (Benedict Arnold's wife). Slavery was legal in the Pennsylvania Colony. Free African-Americans were also controlled by law and treated differently than whites. During the American Revolutionary War the Liberty Bell was hidden in the Zion's Reform Church in Allentown. The Pennsylvania Colony was a proprietary colony until the American Revolution began. It then became the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and one of America's first 13 states. The Pennsylvania Colony became a U.S. state on December 12th, 1787.Set Apart: Religious Communities in Pennsylvania Overview: Set Apart: Religious Communities in Pennsylvania

"All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences; no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship... against his consent."

William Penn, Declaration of Rights, 1682

William Penn envisioned his colony of Pennsylvania as a "Holy Experiment," where all could enjoy religious freedom zoom Sketch of William Penn, from life.

When William Penn issued his Declaration of Rights in 1682, the idea that individuals have a natural right to worship according to the dictates of their own conscience was a radical, even subversive notion. No nation in Europe embraced it. Indeed, most used the full force of the law to punish religious "separatists" who broke from established, or state-affiliated, churches. Fines, imprisonment, and execution, however, did not deter Christians who believed they were called by God to embrace different forms of worship and belief.

In the 1680s Europe was still reeling from the aftershocks of the Protestant Reformation, that great split in Christianity that had unleashed one hundred years of religious war and remade the map of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic Church and in the 1530s created the Church of England over which he, the King, presided, England, too, experienced generations of religious conflict.

In the aftermath of the bloody civil war of the 1640s, when Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan and Presbyterian supporters dethroned and then beheaded England's King Charles I, religious dissenters were free to worship more openly and varied religious enthusiasms took hold. For the future colony of Pennsylvania, and for the religious communities that would find haven there, the most important group of dissenters to flourish during this period was the Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers.

From its start in 1647, when founder George Fox exhorted his neighbors to reject the empty formalism and rituals of the Church of England and seek a personal relationship with God, the Society of Friends threatened religious and political authorities. Believing that God existed in all people, Friends rejected the trained clergy and structured services of the Anglican Church. Instead they gathered in meetings where they sat in silence until a Friend was moved by God to speak.Oil on canvas of several small children, animals, and Penn's treaty in the left background. In this painting a child touches the head of a docile leopard and the animal faces seem collectively less fierce. zoom Edward Hicks, Peaceable Kingdom, circa 1834.

Friends' trust in this Inner Light gave rise to other radical notions. In an effort to follow the model and teachings of Christ, they refused to bear arms, remove their hats before civil or religious authorities, swear any form of oath, or tithe. Fortified by the conviction that they were doing God's will, they wrote inflammatory pamphlets condemning corruption in the Anglican church, interrupted Anglican church services to loudly promote their views, adopted a different style of dress, permitted women to speak - and when so moved to preach - in meeting, and in other ways antagonized religious and civil authorities.

To discourage and suppress these annoying and disrespectful radicals, British courts fined, flogged, and imprisoned Friends by the thousands. Holding to the example of the apostles who had suffered for the name of Jesus, hundreds chose to die in prison rather than renounce their faith.

The Friends' more popular name of Quaker appeared during this period of persecution. According to one version of the story, an unrepentant George Fox, dragged into court yet again for challenging the Church of England, lectured the judge to "tremble at the word of the Lord," to which the judge dryly replied that it was Fox who should "quake" in his presence. Another version had the judge admonishing Fox to "quake in the face of the Lord." Either way, the name Quaker stuck and became the popular term for the Friends.

The Cave of Kelpius and Rosicrucian marker. zoom The “Cave of Kelpius,” Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, PA, circa 2010. ... Shortly after founding the Society of Friends, Fox began to investigate the possibility of establishing a haven for Quakers in North America. In 1660 Quaker Josiah Cole traveled to territory north of Maryland to explore purchase of land from the Susquehannocks or Delaware. In 1672, Fox made his own tour of Britain's American colonies to seek a new home for his besieged flock. Following a scouting trip to the colony of West Jersey - present-day New Jersey - a group of Friends established the village of Salem in 1675, and Fox urged his friend and supporter William Penn to sponsor the immigration of 800 more Quakers.

Born in 1644, William Penn had joined the Quakers in his teens and soon became one of their most eloquent spokesmen and effective defenders. The son of Admiral William Penn, a celebrated war hero and commander of the British fleet, the junior Penn stunned English upper-class society when he converted from the established Church of England to this much-maligned sect. In the years that followed Penn agitated for Quakers' political rights and criticized English religious authorities, on occasion landing in prison for his efforts.

Penn was unable to provide much help for Fox in 1675, but when the Admiral died in 1680, the thirty-six-year-old Penn came into possession of a debt of £16,000 that the crown owed to his father for services rendered. In 1681 Penn requested that Charles II grant him the last large unclaimed territory on the North American seaboard as payment for the debt. When Charles agreed and awarded him a province of more than 40,000 square miles, Penn became the largest private landowner in the whole of Great Britain.Bakery Saal Saron exterior zoom The Bakery, (on the left), Saal (center), and Saron (right) buildings at the...

In Pennsylvania, as his new province was called, Penn was determined to create not just a refuge for Quakers, but a "Holy Experiment," where religious freedom would be the cornerstone of the new social order. Although Penn's royal charter had made him the governor as well as proprietor of his colony, rather than install himself as a feudal lord, he helped write and then agreed to a Frame of Government that allowed for freedom of conscience in religious matters and recognized the separation of church and state.

To attract settlers to Pennsylvania, Penn traveled throughout the continent, promoting his colony to both Quakers and other religious groups suffering persecution for their beliefs. Many accepted Penn's invitation to come to the New World, and Pennsylvania quickly became a multinational and multi-religious colony unlike any other in North America. Rich with natural resources and economic opportunities, it attracted Quakers, as well as English Anglicans, French Huguenots, Scottish and Scots-Irish Presbyterians, Irish Catholics, and Jews. For most of the eighteenth century, Pennsylvania was one of the few places under British control where Catholics could legally worship.

Penn's promise of religious toleration was particularly welcomed by religious dissenters in the German Lutheran states, where a religious revival had been flourishing for at least a decade. Rebelling against the formalism of the established Protestant churches, pietists, as these religious dissenters came to be known, insisted upon a more spiritual and living faith, emphasizing simplicity, emotion, and the necessity of a new birth.Color landscape of Bethlehem,Pa. zoom Bethlehem, PA, by Nicholas Garrison, 1784.

Eager to escape religious oppression, the first group of German Quakers and Mennonites immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1693 and settled Germantown, which became the base for early German settlement in the New World. They were soon followed by some 5,000 Lutherans, Dunkers, Mennonites, Schwenkfelders, Dutch Reformed, and other German pietist groups.

Trusting in their personal experiences of God rather than established authorities, pietists organized into dozens of often contentious denominations, including religious separatists from the radical Protestant fringe. William Penn's Holy Experiment provided these groups an opportunity to live in holy communities that kept separate from the sinful world and remained quite independent from outside civil or religious authority.

To purify themselves for the Second Coming of Christ and make themselves worthy of his grace, radical pietists drew the rules for their communities directly from the New Testament. Reading Acts 2 and 4, some decided to give up personal possessions "and hold all things in common," creating communistic commonwealths that rejected private property. From their reading Christ's Sermon on the Mount and the Gospels, German Mennonites, Quakers, Moravians, and the Swiss Amish became pacifists, and refused to swear oaths. Pietists' varying and often unconventional interpretations of the Bible thus gave rise to very different faiths.

The first religious communitarians to make the trip to Pennsylvania were a small group of German pietist hermits led by Johannes Kelpius who voyaged to Penn's colony to await the advent of Christ in the unspoiled wilderness of the New World. After Christ failed to arrive as expected in 1694, the celibate Brothers who belonged to a group known among the colonists as "The Woman in the Wilderness" lived ascetic lives in their Tabernacle on a ridge above the Wissahickon River, just north of Philadelphia.Exterior and grounds zoom Old Economy, Ambridge, PA, 2010.

The two largest groups of German religious communitarians to come to Pennsylvania were the Moravians and Harmonists. Fleeing persecution at home, Moravians established several closed theocratic communities in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley in the early 1740s. Following their founder George Rapp to the woods of western Pennsylvania, the Harmonists in the early 1800s lived in a single celibate community of co-religionists whose success both economically and socially won it international acclaim. Voluntarily living in closed religious settlements with communal economic systems, both groups loved music, which they made an important part of their worship, as did Conrad Beissel, who organized a community at Ephrata in 1732, and embraced pacifism.

The Moravians were the oldest of the Old World Protestant denominations, predating Martin Luther and the Reformation by more than a half century. George Rapp had begun preaching to his Wurttemburg neighbors fewer than twenty years before their immigration to Pennsylvania in 1804. The Moravians were avid missionaries, and used the wealth produced by their "General Economy" to fund missionary work among their German-speaking neighbors and Native Americans.

Believing that Christ would soon return to call them to his celestial kingdom, the Harmonists made no effort to win converts. Whereas the Moravians in fewer than twenty years abandoned their communal economic system, gave up residence in sex and age-segregated "choirs" to live in traditional family units, and eventually opened their settlements to outsiders and assimilated among their neighbors, the Harmonists held to their faith and communistic sharing of wealth throughout the nineteenth century.This WPA poster depicts an Amish family and encourages tourism in the Central Pennsylvania region. Pennsylvania welcomed religious dissenters during the colonial period, and the Amish in particular have become an important and enduring part of Pennsylvania's identity. zoom WPA poster depicting and Amish family

On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly one hundred years after Penn first laid out plans for his "Holy Experiment," Pennsylvania had the greatest mix of peoples and religions in British North America. In Penn's time, the idea of a peaceful society based on religious pluralism had been a radical and untested proposition. But to the nation's Founding Fathers, it was an inalienable human right, one they enshrined in the first Amendment to the Constitution, which begins, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." Yet these very principles were not always easy for American patriots to accept, and some criticized, harassed, and persecuted religious dissenters during the American Revolution, whose pacifism and desire to remain aloof from political affairs ran counter to the spirit of the times.

Efforts to restore the kingdom of Heaven on Earth and to form separate communities meant to serve as models for the nation - and the world - did not end with the enshrinement of the principle of religious freedom in the United States Constitution. The new Republic was plagued by a number of problems: racial inequality, slavery, disparity of wealth, social violence, greed, and myriad other social problems.

So the search for communitarian solutions to these and other ills continued. Indeed, the American experiment in representative self-government made the United States the ideal site for new communitarian experiments that would be based on social contracts fashioned by reason as well as those based on religious faith. And Pennsylvania continued to attract both religious and secular communitarians who believed that small groups of people bonded together by shared beliefs could advance human progress in this world, or prepare the ground for a better world to be found beyond.

In 2000, close to 10,000 Americans lived in more than 500 intentional communities nationwide; some based on religious beliefs, others built around other ideals and systems of belief. Today, Pennsylvanians of hundreds of different faiths live and work together peacefully, and the communitarian impulse survives in myriad forms: religious and secular, urban and rural, pacifist and apocalypticChapter One: The Moravians

Portrait facing left zoom Czech Priest John Huss, burned at the stake in 1415. After tying him to the stake, the Roman Catholic clerics in Prague gave the popular University Rector one last chance to recant his heresies against the church. "God is my witness," John Hus replied, "that I have never taught or preached that which false witnesses have testified against me.... In the truth of that gospel which hitherto I have written, taught, and preached, I now joyfully die." After the fire was lit Hus sang Kyrie Eleison until the smoke stifled his voice. When the flames had done their work, his ashes and even the soil on which they lay were thrown into the Rhine.

Oil on canvas painting of Zinzendorf als Lehrer der Völker, preaching to congregation. Here Zinzendorf is receiving the light of God. zoom Zinzendorf als Lehrer der, by Johann Valentin Haidt, circa 1747. For a decade before his martyrdom in 1415, John Hus (1373-1415) had been the Catholic rector of the University of Prague, one of the largest and most prestigious universities in central Europe. Criticizing the Roman Catholic Church for selling indulgences, Hus had begun to preach the "Gospel of Christ" in the Bohemian tongue rather than Latin, argued that all Christians had not just the right but the duty to read and study the Bible for themselves, and called for a return to the "heart religion" practiced by the primitive Christians. When Hus refused to admit to what he deemed false charges of heresy, the Roman Catholic clerics ordered him burned at the stake. But Hus's movement did not die.

In 1457, a large group gathered 200 miles east of Prague outside the castle of Lititz and organized themselves into the Unitas Fratrum, or United Brethren. Sixty years before Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation that would sweep Europe, these men and women began what would become the longest-lived of all Protestant churches. For the next 250 years the United Brethren suffered wave after wave of imprisonment, torture, exile, and suppression. Small bands survived, however, holding onto Hus's vision of "the faith that works"; that is, the practice of faith through the actions of one's daily life and especially Christian love, non-violence, and simplicity.

The Brethren emerged with renewed vigor in the 1720s when Moravian carpenter Christian David met Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf of Saxony, a rich, highly-educated, practical, and deeply religious aristocrat who as a child had been schooled in the teachings of the German pietists by the two noble women who had raised him. Zinzendorf granted David and other Moravian refugees land upon which they built a town they called Herrnut.A 1758 map of the Moravian settlement of Bethlehem. zoom Map of the Moravian settlement of Bethlehem, PA, 1758.

Intent upon cultivating harmony among the more than 300 residents of Herrnut, Zinzendorf in 1727 provided a new order for their lives. Believing that men and women, old and young, had different spiritual needs, he divided them into sex and age-segregated "choirs," each one governed by their own elders. A College of Elders presided over the choirs and made all community decisions; above these elders stood Zinzendorf himself.

The foundations of the new faith laid, and believing that it was their duty to bring their message of salvation to all, Zinzendorf sent Moravian missionaries to save souls in neighboring German states and in 1732, in the Dutch West Indies and Greenland.

Outraged at the reappearance of Moravians in Bohemia, the Lutheran Church, now the established church of the region, pressured the King of Saxony to banish Zinzendorf, and the United Brethren were once again on the move. Exiled from Saxony, Zinzendorf founded congregations in Holland, England, Ireland, and elsewhere in Germany. Other Moravians became part of the "Sea Congregations" that emigrated to the West Indies, South America, South Africa, and North America. Within a decade the Moravians had put in place the most ambitious mission program ever developed by the Protestant world.Color landscape of Bethlehem,Pa. zoom Bethlehem, PA, by Nicholas Garrison, 1784.

In 1736, Moravians established their first North American colony along the banks of the Savannah River in Georgia. Caught in the war between their British hosts and Spain, the pacifist Brethren moved north to Pennsylvania where they bought 500 acres of land at the confluence of the Monocacy and Lehigh Rivers in northeast Pennsylvania. There on a cold Christmas eve under a sea of stars, the small band of colonists huddled in a single log cabin and held a Moravian "love feast" with the newly arrived Zinzendorf and his daughter. That night Zinzendorf named the new settlement Bethlehem.

Soon afterwards the Brethren purchased 5,000 acres ten miles to the northwest, founding the settlement they named markerNazareth. Directed by the General Synod in Germany, the Moravians also founded settlements at markerEmmaus in the Lehigh Valley, markerLititz in Lancaster County, Hope in northern New Jersey, and markerDansbury near the New York border, which served as a base for missionary efforts among the Lenape people.

Exterior, stereoscopic view. zoom Moravian Gemein House, Bethlehem, PA, circa 1870. Adopting the communal order under which they had lived at Herrnut, the Moravians at Bethlehem and Nazareth created closed theocratic communities that limited their interaction with outsiders. As they had at Herrnut, they lived in segregated choirs and soon built a separate markerBrethren's House for single men, markerSisters' House for marker women, and schools for both girls and boys. Organized in 1794, markerLinden Hall in Lititz is the oldest girls' boarding school in the United States.

Missionary work remained an essential part of the Moravian order. To keep their focus on a spiritual life while producing the wealth necessary to support their missionary activities, the Moravians at Bethlehem in 1744 voluntarily entered into a "General Economy," whereby they pooled all of their work and resources. The General Economy soon spread to Nazareth, Lititz, and Wachovia, North Carolina - the seat of the Moravians' southern settlements - making it the largest communitarian enterprise in colonial North America.

By 1761, Bethlehem had become a thriving community of more than 2,500 people, close to fifty businesses, and more than 2,000 acres of farmland and pasture.

For Moravians music was an essential aid to worship, so it was part of every religious service and celebration. Moravian choruses won renown for their beautiful harmonies, and Bethlehem became a musical center, its musicians introducing much of the great classical music of Europe to North America. The playing of hymns required the construction of church organs. Between the 1760s and his death in 1804, markerDavid Tannenberg built and supervised the installation of nearly fifty instruments of his own design in churches throughout the Commonwealth

For eighteen years, Nazareth and Bethlehem bore the full financial burden of the Brethren's missionary work in North America. Moravian missionaries worked tirelessly to carry the message of Christ to Europeans and Native Americans in eastern North America. Zinzendorf himself spent two years attempting unsuccessfully to create a grand "Congregation of God in the Spirit" among all the German settlers of Pennsylvania. During his sixty-year career, Moravian missionary markerDavid Zeisberger converted hundreds of Lenape and Iroquois.The ordered life of the Moravians is suggested by this 1761 Nicholas Garrison painting of their community at Nazareth. zoom A view of the Moravian town of Nazareth, PA, circa 1761.

Other colonists often viewed with concern and suspicion the close relations that Moravian missionaries were able to establish with Native American tribes that others feared. After Indian warriors attacked frontier settlements during the bloody French and Indian War of the mid 1700s, a group of vigilantes known as the Paxton Boys in 1763 massacred twenty markerConestoga Indian men, women, and children, even though they were pacifist Christians. During the American Revolution, Moravian Indian converts again became victims of war when a band of vigilantes murdered and scalped another ninety-six of them.

Village scene of buildings and landscape zoom Young Ladies' Seminary and Church, at Bethlehem, PA, by Gustavus Grunewald,... In 1762 the General Synod in Germany ordered the Moravians in Pennsylvania to abandon the General Economy for more traditional family units. At first the change had little impact on the close-knit communities as Moravians continued to live, work, and worship in settlements that excluded outsiders. Gradually, however, many of the faithful moved away from their experiment in utopian Christian community.

As pacifists, Moravians could not bear arms or swear oaths of allegiance during either the French and Indian War or the American Revolution. Bethlehem did, however, serve as a military hospital during the Revolution, and some Moravian men, disobeying orders from the General Synod to shun involvement in political affairs, did supply material support and take up arms for the cause of Independence.

In 1818 the General Synod rejected the Pennsylvania Moravians' petition to bear arms during times of war, but did permit ending the practice of determining marriages by the casting of lots - yes, no, or blank - which Moravians had long practiced as a way to determine God's will.An early 19th century painting of a Moravian "Single Sister." Single women would be pictured wearing pink bows; married Sisters were pictured with blue bows. zoom Painting of a Moravian "single sister," Lehigh Valley, PA, circa 1840.

In accordance with their faith, Moravians emphasized individual conversion to the Gospel of Christ rather than doctrinal conformity. Zinzendorf had begun missionary work to extend the faith not of Moravians - for the Count believed that the Moravians would one day be absorbed by other churches - but of a more ecumenical Protestant Christianity. This, perhaps more than any other single factor, had restrained the growth of the Moravian Church in America.

In the 1820s the General Synod at long last permitted American Moravians to establish new congregations and in 1844 abolished the settlement system that had banned outsiders from moving into Moravian towns. In 1855, American Moravians finally became self-governing when the American provincial synods gathered in Bethlehem and declared their independence from the General Synod.

Deeply committed to their mission to bring Christ's love to non-believers, Moravians continued, in the words of one of their early members, to "fly to every region of America [and the world] as evangelists, as doves from a dove-cote." At the end of the twentieth century the Moravian Church had 39,000 members in the United States and between five hundred and seven hundred thousand worldwide, the largest numbers residing in Tanzania and South Africa.

And the multitude of those that believed were of one heart and one soul; neither said any of them that any of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.

Acts 4: 32-35

When William Penn in the 1680s opened his lands in North America as a haven for his fellow Quakers, he also offered it as a refuge to other Europeans who suffered persecution for their religious beliefs. Pennsylvania quickly became a multinational and multi-religious colony unlike any other in North America. Rich with natural resources and economic opportunities, it attracted English Anglicans, French Huguenots, Scottish and Scots-Irish Presbyterians, Irish Catholics, and Sephardic Jews.Johannes Kelpius led the first religious communitarians to settle in Pennsylvania. zoom Johannes Kelpius, by Christopher Witt, 1705.

For most of the eighteenth century, Pennsylvania was one of the few areas under British control where Catholics could legally worship. Penn's promise of religious toleration proved especially attractive to Protestant sectarians in Germany, more than 5,000 of whom left their homes to settle in Pennsylvania during the eighteenth century.

Among the religious refugees who immigrated to Pennsylvania were small groups of radical German-speaking Protestants who were determined to live apart from others. These religious communitarians believed that they constituted a separate and consecrated body that must live apart from the sinfulness of the world. Many wanted to recreate the simple lives and pure faith of the early Christians and to create autonomous states as independent as possible from outside civil or religious authority. The desire to distance themselves from the corruption of the world also had motivated the Pilgrims in their migration to Plymouth in 1620 and the great Puritan exodus to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. The English separatists who settled in New England, however, were no friends of religious pluralism.Exterior of the buildings and grounds zoom Bakery (on left), Saal (Meetinghouse) and Saron (Sisters’ House), Ephrata...

The 1730s witnessed the appearance in Pennsylvania of two pietist groups that would become deeply identified with Pennsylvania: the "Solitaries" and "Householders" of the Ephrata Cloister, a non-utopian sect, and the Amish. Founded in 1732 by Conrad Beissel, a German pietist who more than a decade before came to Pennsylvania to join markerKelpius's monks, markerEphrata won international renown as an economically self-sufficient and deeply spiritual community of celibate and married Christians. The Brothers and Sisters of Ephrata soon became well known among the German immigrants in Lancaster for their rigorous ascetic life, the services they provided the larger community, and their belief in the imminent return of Christ to the world.

Emphasizing spiritual rather than material goals, the Brothers and Sisters of the Ephrata Cloister made important contributions to colonial life and culture. They ran an important printing operation and produced exquisite, hand-illuminated books and documents in the style known as Fraktur. The choir performed its renowned hymnal music in a hauntingly beautiful style designed to move listeners and singers alike to a state of mystical exaltation. In the late 1700s, an "offspring" of Ephrata formed at the base of the South Mountains in Pennsylvania's Franklin County. Although it bore little physical resemblance to the Cloister of Ephrata, the markerSnow Hill community carried the spirit of Beissel's movement into the 1890s.

In 1736, a small group of Swiss Brethren known as the Amish, or followers of Jakob Ammann, established their first significant New World settlement at markerNorthkill on the Berks County frontier. Insistent upon strict separation from the world and the expulsion and shunning of sinners, the Amish would thrive in Pennsylvania and, unlike the other German religious communitarians, maintain their separate communities to the present day.

The Amish, like the Quakers, Mennonites, Moravians, and Beissel's followers at Ephrata, were pacifists. Following Christ's self-sacrificial model and his Sermon on the Mount, their churches taught them to be willing to die, but not to kill for their beliefs. Maintaining their "non-association" with the local militias and their detachment from political affairs, however, proved problematic, especially during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution when their refusal to bear arms and attempts to remain politically neutral drew the anger of their neighbors and Pennsylvania's political and military leaders.Oil on canvas of Joseph Smith wearing a black suit with white, high collared shirt. zoom Joseph Smith, by Adrian Lamb, copy after unidentified artist, circa 1840.

During the American Revolution, the peace churches struggled to maintain their distance from the outside world, even as the events of the war intruded on their communities. After disastrous defeats at Brandywine Creek and Germantown, the American army carted wounded soldiers to Ephrata, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Lititz, where they commandeered buildings and the pacifist pietists into service.

Once free from Britain, Americans joined together in a nation that guaranteed a broad range of inalienable rights to its citizens, including the free practice of religion. But the new Republic was also plagued by race slavery, violence, greed, and other human imperfections. So the search for religious communitarian solutions to the problems of the human condition continued. Indeed, the American experiment in representative self-government made the United States the ideal site for new communitarian experiments that would be based on social contracts fashioned by reason as well as those based on religious faith.

In the early nineteenth century, tens of thousands of Americans were swept up in religious revivals so widespread they became known as the Second Great Awakening. From the "Burned Over District" of western New York to the canebrakes of Kentucky, Americans followed new prophets and embraced new faiths, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose founder markerJoseph Smith, first worked on his translation of the Book of Mormon while living on his father-in-law's farm near Great Bend, Pennsylvania. In the isolated valley that surrounded the Great Salt Lake, the Mormons created an independent, theocratic state with its own government and army.Image of Greeley in the woods holding an axe over his shoulder. zoom Horace Greeley, 1869

In the 1830s and early 1840s, thousands embraced the vision of millennialist preacher William Miller, who prophesized the Second Coming of Christ would occur in March 1843. In 1850 former Millerite Peter Armstrong led a small group of followers to the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania to found the community of markerCelestia. For more than thirty years Armstrong and his followers eagerly anticipated the return of their Savior. Like the Harmonists of western Pennsylvania, the residents of Celestia pooled their property and labor into a communistic economic system deeded to "Almighty God and to his heirs in Jesus Messiah" to better prepare themselves for Christ's imminent return.

Secular efforts to accelerate human progress in the world through communitarian principles also arose during the early 1800s. Among the most significant was that promoted by English industrialist Robert Owen, who in 1824 bought the Harmonists' abandoned community in Indiana and attempted to build a socialist utopia that would serve as a model for the world. Owen's "New Harmony" experiment quickly failed, but the dream lived on as social theorists and reformers on both sides of the Atlantic designed communitarian models for a more perfect human society.

Alfred Brisbane initiated another communitarian movement in the 1840s, when he introduced Americans to the ideas of French socialist Charles Fourier in his best-selling book, The Social Destiny of Man. In a wave of enthusiasm, American Fourierists launched more than forty rural "phalanxes" during that decade, modeled on Brisbane's Americanized version of Fourier's ideas. The first of these, financed by markerThe Sylvania Society, took shape on thirty two thousand acres bordering the Delaware River in Pike County, Pennsylvania. Few American phalanxes lasted more than a year or two, but a handful, including Brooks Farm in Massachusetts, gripped the imaginations of people seeking peaceful and voluntary ways to perfect the human condition.

The rapid failure of these antebellum utopias did not end the search for communitarian solutions to human problems. An exploding population, rapid industrialization, and the rising cost of land did, however, make it harder to buy land for large settlements. In the 1870s German Hutterites set up communities on the northern Great Plains, and splinter groups of United Order Mormons formed communities that for a short time rejected private property. Small cooperative associations of spiritualists, perfectionists, brotherhoods, sanctified Sisters, and others appeared and disappeared across the United States.Perspective from Southwest. zoom The Divine Lorraine Hotel, Philadelphia, PA., 2008.

In the twentieth century American communitarians banded together in cities as well as the woods, and sought salvation in an increasing diversity of religious traditions. The twentieth century also witnessed the birth of a worldwide network of multiracial religious communities whose members followed the teachings of Indian gurus, Sufi mystics, and African-American prophets.

In the early 1930s, African-American evangelist markerFather Divine created an urban, multiracial, international religious community that sought to cultivate loving relations between the races, and encouraged its members to work hard, avoid debt, pay taxes, and resist Communism. During the Great Depression his Peace Mission Movement provided badly needed goods and services for people in need, regardless of their race. In the 1940s Father Divine relocated from New York to the Philadelphia suburb of Gladwyne. In Philadelphia, the Peace Mission opened the Divine Lorraine Hotel on North Broad Street, one of the first, high-quality integrated hotels in the City of Brotherly Love.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Pennsylvania continued to be home to a growing diversity of what increasingly were referred to as "intentional" communities. In the 1960s and early 1970s people embracing the values of the anti-consumerist American "counter-culture" banded together in communes in the Pocono Mountains and along the banks of the Delaware River. Followers of Indian yogi Amrit Desai moved to his Hindu Ashram at Sumneytown in Berks County, where many embraced celibacy and donated their labor, wages, and assets to the community.Amish farm families continue to live and work in Pennsylvania today, following the pacifist traditions and values of their forebears. zoom Amish farmer, Lancaster, PA, circa 2000.

In Philadelphia, African-American followers of Vincent Leaphart, who adopted the name John Africa, lived communally in row houses, emphasizing physical work, healthy diet, and resistance to what they considered to be an unjust and corrupt social system, one that was especially oppressive to black Americans. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, members of Africa's MOVE organization clashed with local police; their homes became fortified compounds; and in 1983, after escalating confrontations with the authorities, Philadelphia police bombed MOVE homes, in the process burning sixty homes and killing all but two MOVE members in the homes at the time.

Meanwhile, in Lancaster, Somerset, Union, and Mifflin counties, Amish farm families continue to live and work following the pacifist traditions and values of their forebears. Eschewing electricity and automobiles, they struggle to maintain their communities in a modern world where encroaching suburban development and rising land prices make it increasingly difficult to follow the centuries-old directive of being in the world, but not of it.https://explorepahistory.com/story The Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia's Independence Hall. Pennsylvania is famous for many places and things including Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, Gettysburg, and Valley Forge.