Above: Click Image to Enlarge.
Collectors of American folk art love the Ephrata Cloister. Ephrata's mystical Brothers and Sisters created icons of Early American art ...masterworks of Pennsylvania German calligraphy and pen-and-ink design, including the earliest fraktur drawings created in America.
The Brothers of the Ephrata print shop were no slouches in the masterworks department. In addition to creating landmarks of American book arts, these printers also produced fraktur taufscheins (letterpress birth and baptism certificates). Local scriveners infilled these fraktur-font documents with color and calligraphy, to record, forever, the birth or baptism dates of their neighbors.
In the early 1780s, the Ephrata printers created the first printed American taufscheins (birth or baptism certificates). Sometime circa 1784, a teen-aged Mennonite girl named Susanna Greider (Kreider), living in Lancaster Township, received one of these first taufscheins, which I show here.
Susanna's family purchased this fraktur document from the eccentric scrivener Henrich Dulheuer, who penned Susanna's birth details onto the paper in red ink. Durng this time, Henrich was living in East Hempfield Township, with the Musselmans, a Mennonite family.
The Ephrata printers had already jazzed up this document by using two woodblocks to print vineing flowers and long-necked birds in the margins. The Brothers used another woodblock to print the flower-filled lower border. (For that border, they apparently recycled a woodblock that was previously used for printing textiles.)
The Ephrata print shop had commissioned a local, non-Cloister artist, Henrich Otto, to paint horizontal bands of ink-and-watercolor vines and flowers to this document.
To top it all off, the Brothers printed their favorite winged angel, top and center. (Or is it the Virgin Sophia?) Whoever he/she is, she apparently was composed of lead: a type-metal cut. She was a popular angel; Christoph Saur and Francis Bailey both printed her countenance in their print shops.
Susanna probably didn't care about her taufschein's printing details. She was just glad to know that someday someone would be reading about her on the Internet.
P.S. Thanks to the late Klaus Stopp for publishing his monumental, 6-volume study of Pennsylvania tauf-scheine.
