Scene on the Road

I'm on U.S. Highway 322, passing though upper Lancaster County as I drive from West Chester to Hershey. Since I spent a week exploring "Pennsylvania Dutch" country for the newspaper last summer, I am avoiding most of the Amish-themed tourist sites on this Week 7 Road Trip.



But the religious heritage of the area is impossible to ignore. Thanks to William Penn's tolerance, many sects having trouble with authorities in their own homeland found their way to Pennsylvania. I end up in one of the oldest of those communities - the Ephrata Cloister.

After being banished from Germany. Pietist Johann Conrad Beissel also ended up here, where - after first settling in Germantown - he founded the Cloister in 1732. At it's peak, some 300 celibate Brothers and Sisters and married local farm families awaited the second coming, living simply at the Cloister, instead of seeking earthly rewards. That's Beissel's home on the right. Above is Saron, the Sisters House, constructed in 1743.

But a monastic life didn't mesh well with the pioneer spirit of our new nation, and even Beissel's successor could see the writing on the wall, telling Benjamin Franklin: “The mind of Americans is bent another way.” By 1813 the last of the celibate members had died.

The smell of ancient wood is all around and the temperature feels like it's dropped ten degrees as I step into the old-tree shade and walk among the surviving original structures, now restored and administered by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The sound of a worker's power saw is the only intrusion I encounter as I make still life photographs of the old European-styled buildings.

Just as in areas of wonderful natural beauty, I am torn between waiting for another visitor to walk through the scene - giving it some scale and human interest - or just making photographs of the details. As is often the case, patience loses out as I attempt to capture visually what I feel and experience at the site.

Less than a mile up Ephrata's Main Street I encounter another religious community in a traditional religious setting - the church fundraising car wash. Colorful sign and balloon-holding teenagers are waving down passing cars, inviting them to the Bethany Slavic Church parking lot.

Fourteen year-old Valentina Zaytsev (she's on the right, in the photo below) and Lily Danilyuk, 15, (next to her) along with members of the church's youth group are collecting money for orphans in Russia. Zaytsev's family, who immigrated in 1991, will travel back to their hometown of Lipetsk outside Moscow later this summer on a church mission.

They just got their own church three years ago. The Pentecostal congregation was founded by pastor Mikhail Khoklan in in 1989, and over the years had been renting space at a big Mennonite church in East Earl Township. "It was, like, surrounded by cornfields," Zaytsev tells me. "All the other Russian churches called us the Corn Church," Danilyuk adds.

The division of labor: the teenage girls out front on Main Street, the twenty-something men of the congregation doing the wet rag heavy lifting in the parking lot behind the church, and the teenage boys counting the money on the steps.




Lancaster County is home to about a half dozen other Russian churches, most started by families of émigrés who arrived during the time of glasnost, when the Soviet government allowed evangelical Christians, many fleeing religious persecution, to leave for the U.S.