The annual Craft Days at the Museum have proven immensely popular. During this two-day event all of the ancient crafts represented in the museum collections flourish again—hand weaving, spinning, potting, furniture and tin painting, candle-making, printing, quilting, braiding, etc. All are demonstrated in appropriate settings. The Conestoga Wagon is again hitched up and steam tractors, charged up, haul wagon-loads of children through the nearby fields. So extensive are the collections that some part of the display is sure to be of great interest to the visitor. Today the museum includes many types of structure typical of small rural Pennsylvania communities of the past ... residential and commercial buildings which provide an authentic background for the demonstration of rural arts, crafts and cottage industries. Ephrata Cloister is the oldest of the properties in this area administered by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Erected between the years 1730 and 1750 it is a unique monument to a holy experiment that failed. [Illustration: This outstanding choral group was founded in February, 1959, for the express purpose of performing the music of the Cloister, as recreated by the Director and Founder of the Chorus, Mr. Russell P. Getz. During the summer season, a series of public recitals are given on the Cloister grounds. For information regarding dates, contact The Cloisters, Ephrata, Pennsylvania.] Here on the banks of the Cocalico, under the leadership of Conrad Beissel, a protestant monastic community was established and for a time flourished. In buildings of a medieval style, reminiscent of their German homeland, the Seventh Day Baptists worked and lived and sought to withdraw themselves from a sinful world. The Saron or Sister House recalls the harsh and primitive conditions under which the nuns of the order lived. The almonry was the center from which the hospitality of the order was extended to all travelers. The printing press of the order, one of Pennsylvania’s oldest, was used in the preparation of the great Mennonite work, the _Martyr’s Mirror_, the preparation of which was the biggest printing job done in colonial America. Short lived as the community was, it was in its day famed throughout Europe and America. It was too much the personal creation of Beissel to long outlast his death and under his successor, Peter Miller, a period of slow and mellow decline began. The community made its contribution to the American Revolution in caring for the wounded brought to Ephrata from the battlefield at Brandywine; many of the Brothers of Zion joined the dying as victims of the camp fever brought to the Cloister by their patients. The community was forced to burn its great buildings on Zion Hill in order to wipe out the infection.