Page 20 - C.A.L.L. #38 - Summer 2014

Separatists at Zoar, Ohio. The earliest benches are from Ephrata Cloister, which was
established in 1732, and is the oldest American communal society for which we have
extant buildings and artifacts, now in the care of the Pennsylvania Historical and
Museum Commission. The newest bench was made sometime in the last ten years at
Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, which is also in southeast Pennsylvania and less than
fifty miles from Ephrata.

This newest bench stands in Rose Hall, which is the meetinghouse at Camphill Village
Kimberton Hills. It is built from oak, which was likely sourced from the community’s
woodlands. Though built in living memory, the name of the individual who made it is
already lost; that this could have happened is owed to the community’s dependence on a
continuing rotation of short-term coworkers. The story of the bench reflects the
structure of the community. At Ephrata Cloister, the Feast Hall bench—which probably
also stood in the Saal, the community meeting house, in an upstairs room where they

held Love Feasts—will also have been built from local lumber. The name of that maker is
lost in time. That the name of neither maker was recorded is characteristic of the
anonymity of traditional
craft practice. This is not to
say that the craftsmen and
women were not respected
by their peers, but that for
craft, as for communalism, it
is the contribution rather
than the contributor that is

celebrated.

The benches, as shared
seating, represent

community. As examples of
craftsmanship, they propose
a reconsideration of value. The intentional association of craft with resistance to
industrial practice—and in our times to mass consumption—dates to the nineteenth
century with William Morris and the origins of the Arts and Crafts movement in Great
Britain. Morris, who is best known for his naturalistic textile and wallpaper designs, also
ran a furniture shop whose products followed simple English rural vernacular traditions,
in sharp contrast to the opulent output of conventional designers of the day. He was,
moreover, an active socialist who spoke regularly to workingmen’s groups and advocated
the overthrow of the social and political order of his time: an order that has changed
little in the Western world in the ensuing years. He had been a poet before he took up
designing for the material world, and he described his dream of a new life in his utopian

novel News from Nowhere. Morris and his utopian vision, became the model for the
Arts and Crafts community founded at Rose Valley outside Philadelphia (fifty miles
from Ephrata Cloister, in the opposite direction from the Camphill Village).

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