Seventh Day Dunkers

[MaxPC]

I receive the email newsletter from the Rocky Cape Christian Community in Tasmania which shares pieces of history of Anabaptist ancestors. The most recent newsletter mentions Seventh Day Dunkers who also lived communally. Does anyone have more information about them?

While Christian Newcomer travelled throughout Pennsylvania, Maryland,
Virginia, Ohio, New York and Upper Canada to lead troubled souls to the
Lord, another earnest group of believers along the Cocalico Creek in
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, sought the Lord in another manner. In
this case through communal living based on extreme simplicity, voluntary
poverty and mutual submission in brotherly and sisterly union. Members
of the "Seventh Day Dunkers" (a branch of the German Baptist movement
that kept the Sabbath) they flourished for many years in a truly amazing
way -- particularly in their publishing and missionary work.

Some of my Dunker (German Baptist) ancestors joined the Ephrata
community in the early 1700s, several of them of the previously
Mennonite Graf family. Jacob Graf's daughter, Sister Priscam, became the
house mother of the single sisters at Ephrata and this morning I
received a copy of a song she wrote many years ago.

[ken_sylvania]

That would have been the Conrad Beissel group that founded Ephrata Cloister.
http://www.ephratacloister.org/history.htm

[MattY]

Here is a link to some of their modern "descendants", theologically speaking.

http://germanseventhdaybaptist.com/

There is also a "Seventh Day Baptist" website with a church locator, but I don't know if these churches would be connected in their heritage to the Anabaptist Dunkers, or to the Protestant Baptists.

http://seventhdaybaptist.org/

[Bill Rushby]

I think that the last remaining Beissel group was located near I-81 in southern Pennsylvania. There is still a communal dwelling there, no longer used as I recall. I think the remnant consisted of families, rather than celibates. As I recall, the Beissel Seventh-day Baptists united with the English-speaking, Baptist-derived Seventh-day Baptist Church sometime in the 20th Century. I don't remember the community where the I-81 cloister is located, but it is close to Old German Baptist residences.

[Bill Rushby]

Aha! "Snow Hill" Cloister, near Quincy PA
http://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=1-A-56

[MaxPC]

Thanks to all for the information. When I spotted that term, "Seventh Day Dunkers", it surprised me as I never would have associated Seventh Day practitioners with Dunkers. You learn something new every day.