We recently participated in a video conference call sponsored by the Foundation of Intentional Community during which we were one of several communities that shared who we are and what we do. Here is a summary of that presentation.

The Hermitage in summary, 2024

The Hermitage is a Harmonist spiritual community in central Pennsylvania. Our goal is to live in harmony and union with earth and spirit which, to us, are dual aspects of the same thing. Recognizing this unity and actively, purposefully, living within it forms the basis for our spirituality and communal life.

While one has to be a Harmonist to live here at the Hermitage, one doesn't have to live at the Hermitage to be a Harmonist. We consider the Hermitage to be a kind of mother ship, but one can be a Harmonist anywhere in the world and without going to any school or undergoing any training or certification program. And there is no diploma, secret decoder ring or neat handshake.

Being a Harmonist does require two things: a commitment to living a life in the spirit, and a commitment to serving the earth. Simply put, as Harmonists we are one in the spirit and the earth is our family.

Beyond that, the spirit unfolds in infinite diversity, and uniquely through each of us. For example, Brother Zephram in his rituals expresses his affinity for Celtic spirituality while, in mine, I reflect my kinship with African animism and Hinduism, particularly Shiva and Kali. And we share a mutual devotion to the old Egyptian animal and bird gods, like Horus, Basket and Anubis, because they are embedded in nature.

That is also why our high holy days are the solstices and equinoxes, as well as the four mid-points between them.

In fact, We view the earth as a tree, firmly rooted in the spirit, with each of us, every living thing, being leaves on the tree, each one unique, each one part of the tree so all of the leaves are connected and attached to the core. The leaves come and go, but the tree remains. .

The Harmonist emblem of the planet is a flower, beautiful, fragile, needing care and nurturing. This is how we serve the spirit.

Our role model for the union of earth, body, and spirit is this queer young man, Christian Renatus von Zinzendorf, who lived in community in Germany in the mid-eighteenth century before dying at 25. We were so inspired by him and what he achieved that we decided to reestablish a similar community here in Pennsylvania and living the life of those early brothers and sisters.

We moved here on a bleak and cold Thanksgiving weekend in 1988 and lived in the barn for almost two years before we found an abandoned log cabin down the valley, moved it here in pieces and restored it. Over the next decade, we moved a number of log and timber-frame structures here and repurposed them as workshops, housing, a library and other uses, creating a community for those we knew would join us.

However we decided that a monastic life was not for us and we changed the cloister to a hermitage, realizing our family included the animals and birds around us, and even the land itself. We continue various projects, including the creation of the Mahantongo Heritage Center, a local history museum, in the barn and other buildings. We want to see the Hermitage continue after us. It is a non-profit organization, and there is a need for a curator for the collections and buildings, and a spirituality advocate who can put out the word on social media and other activities.

We are open to visitors from June through October by contacting us.

 

Four Freedoms I Value

I'm a member of an international spirituality group that meets monthly via Zoom. Recently, we discussed the possibility of what shared religious or spiritual beliefs there might be among the world's peoples. The moderator that day was hopeful, though without being specific.

I remain skeptical about what ideas and beliefs humanity might hold in common, especially considering the nearly infinite variety of religions, spiritualities and philosophies that exist, and how tightly and fervently they are often held by many people, and which often seem in direct contradiction with others that are equally tightly and fervently held. Where is common ground between polytheism, animism, monotheism and atheism for example? What could possibly be shared among those who hold these apparently disparate and even contradictory beliefs and non-beliefs? Is there indeed a perennial philosophy as Aldous Huxley envisioned if we just dig deeply enough? A kind of core mysticism that really does bind us together?

Still, I wonder if a world-wide survey could even get most people to agree to what would seem to be common-place facts, such as positing that “We are humans living on planet Earth.” Surely there would be those who, for whatever reason or reasons, would disagree.

So I've taken an opposite approach, to enumerate core values that I hold to be foundational just for my own life, and they surround the idea of freedom:

1. Freedom to nurture (my self, others, the earth and its creatures).

2. Freedom to be (whatever and whoever I am, even if, and especially if, that changes over time).

3.Freedom to become (the best and most I can be, as a flowering plant needs rich soil, nutrients, water, appropriate light and dark, and a supportive climate).

4. Freedom to connect (with others, the planet, and the ever-creating spirit which, to me, actually is the planet).

These freedoms require us to respect the same freedoms in others in order for them to exist at all. Either all of us have them, or none. There's no fudging on this. And these freedoms also exist for the planet and its creatures because we are as much a part of the planet as it is part of us. These freedoms recognize and, indeed, even demand an interconnected world. We exist in proximity to everything else.

I take these four freedoms as a basic birthright for us all. They can certainly be abrogated, but not given, as no person, society or government can bestow rights that are inherent in be simply being alive.

The issue then is to find or create a society, a government, where these four freedoms can be recognized. A lot of it, of course, has to do with a hands-off approach of a government toward its citizens, standing back and letting them grow and associate as they will. Where is such a state to be found today?

Certainly it exists in many intentional communities, which typically separate as much as possible from the larger society around them. But the broader society has a way of impinging on us whether we want it to or not. The question is whether societies enhance, restrict, or even acknowledge these freedoms in some form or other. Too often, even in America, we see governmental force used to restrict personal freedom, and the lack of a right to privacy in the Constitution is crippling to the very idea of privacy.

Encouraging governments and societies at large not to restrict these freedoms but to recognize and enhance them is a lengthy process that will require one-to-one interaction to persuade and inform. And changing governments with no interest in recognizing these freedoms in a peaceful and non-violent way is challenging, but not impossible. Force plays no role in such change if these freedoms are truly understood.

They are ideals to work towards in a broader context, while remaining daily guideposts in my own behavior which, quite frankly, I don't always attain.

 

Power and the Spirit at the Hermitage

Delivered at the April, 2023 conference on the uses and abuses of power sponsored by Harvard Divinity School

Here at the Hermitage, a Harmonist community in central Pennsylvania, our bottom line is that the earth is incarnated spirit, that we are created by the spirit; sustained and maintained by the spirit at every moment; and, at the end of our apparently individual lives, we return to the spirit to be taken apart and recycled again and again through countless eons of time as the spirit unfolds. We are the stuff of stars and dinosaurs.

A line from the Judeo-Christian tradition says “This is the day the Lord has made.” As Harmonists, we have a different take: this is the day the spirit is making. Note the present tense and the active gerund form of the verb, the ongoing being and becoming of the spirit, creating an underlying unity and wholeness of existence.

However, our birds here at the Hermitage are having none of that. As I was feeding lettuce to the chickens this morning, a hen grabbed a large chunk and ran protectively away with it, and I could just hear her thinking, “Mine! All mine!” And then there was the goose who, despite standing in a veritable sea of cracked corn, nonetheless thought “Mine! All mine!” as another goose approached to eat and the first goose went wild, lowered its head, extended its long neck and chased the encroaching bird around the barn yard, hissing and honking. Meanwhile, the smart geese came up and ate their fill.

And don't think this is just for birds. Recently as I was driving to Harrisburg and getting on the on-ramp for the freeway, I noticed an impatient vehicle behind my old, slow van edging out and getting ready to pass me and anger immediately overwhelmed me and I thought, “My space! All mine!” and swerved out in front of it to head it off, which was dangerous, stupid, and which I immediately regretted, and spent the rest of the day being a most repentent and courteous driver, letting people on and off and graciously sharing the freeway, and there was a lot to share. We weren't running out of freeway.

So I don't know if I was being more birdlike, or if the birds were being more human, or if all of us were just similar living organisms, all caught up in Aristotle's world, where A is A, B is B, and C is C, and where the underlying unity and wholeness of life is sliced and diced into apparently discrete and separate bits and pieces, and you and I are among those bits and pieces.

This is what I call the illusion of the egg. Think of a nest of eggs, and inside every one is a growing chick thinking, “Mine! All mine!” Its entire world is contained inside the opaque shell, with no idea that there is anything beyond it. And yet this illusion has a purpose; it helps us realize that we, as apparently independent organisms, need to survive; we need food, water, shelter, and it empowers us to meet those needs so we can survive; it activates us.

Of course, taken to an extreme, we develop pecking orders, a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, where not only is what's mine is mine, but what's yours is mine as well, especially in a world without consequences. That is how hierarchies develop, pyramids of power, with broad bases but typically only one person at the top, traditionally a white straight guy. We live surrounded by hierarchies; hierarchies of politics, finance, business, media. And that sucking sound you hear is power going from the broad base up to the top. But those at the top – whether pharaohs, czars, presidents or CEO's – don't always attain their power unethically. We give politicians our votes; we send money to Amazon; and we expect things in return through some kind of transaction.

It's easy to say this is the way of the world, but what if something happens? What if we peck through the shell and sunlight comes streaming in and we stand up and see our brothers and sisters coming out of their shells and we realize we are actually part of something much bigger than we thought? This gives us a new context, a new perspective, and our understanding of the world and ourselves is forever changed.

Let's say you're a penguin and you're swimming in the ocean and you come across an iceberg, and you see the tip sticking up out of the water and you think, “That's me.” But then you take a deep dive and you go under water and you see this vast mass and you just gasp, “Oh, my word.” And you realize this vast mass is also you, that you are part of it, and the little part sticking out of the water is connected and part of this big thing under the water. Let's see how that new perspective affects our understanding of who we are and the world we inhabit.

Let's start with me as being connected with the spirit. How can I understand what that means? How can I understand the implications for nurturing the spirit? For serving the spirit? It starts with listening; listening with intent, active listening. It demands concentration but it's also a learned skill. By listening to the spirit, we understand how it works through us.

Now, let's go up the chain of increasing social complexity to our significant other or others, if we have one. We need to bring that listening skill with us. I have been, rightly, accused many times of acting unilaterally, of doing what I want to do. I like to think that happens much less frequently now than it did, but it still happens. And why? Because it's easy. It's easy to make decisions for others and to act as though their opinions don't count. And the way to change this is by asking them, “What do you think?” Just “What do you think?” Because the question admits our limits, that we know what we think but not what the other one thinks. And at that point we can start the process of collaboration, of cooperation, of consensus.

Now, let's go up to the level of an intentional community, where we need to ask the same question of 10, 20, 30, or more people. It can be done. It's hard, but it's a process and gets easier with practice. And if some person says, “Do what I say because the spirit speaks through me,” you can rightly counter that the spirit speaks through you as well, and everyone can say that, and pretty soon we're in Quaker meeting.

Next, at the village or town level, the New England town meeting is a good example of how small communities can still work directly together. But it gets harder with a city, a county, a state, a nation, or many nations. Still, I like to think that with modern technology and social media, that we can have a more direct, participatory democracy instead of a representational democracy. I'm not sure how that would work, but we can at least start asking the questions. This starts to flatten the political hierarchy.

Business and financial hierarchies can also be flattened. I'm thinking of the distance between the lowest paid and the highest paid in a company. I understand in Japan that it's common to find a difference of the power of 10 between the lowest paid worker and the highest paid management position; whereas in this country it can be 100 times or more. Increasing worker participation in management decisions, and on boards of directors, are other ways to flatten the hierarchy.

I would love to live in a world where we had a National Happiness Index similar to what Bhutan has developed. Maybe we could call it a National Index of Well-Being. I would love to hear on the daily news that, while the stock market has gone down so many points, that the National Well-Being Index has gone up because there are more children in subsidized day care, and so many single mothers have found skilled work, etc.

In our daily lives here at the Hermitage, we have found four behaviors that help keep us on track, that allow us to recognize the divinity in ourselves, in those around us, in all living things, and in the planet itself: kindness, patience, humility, respect. And those four words are the complete lyrics, repeated over and over, of one of our hymns: kindness, patience, humility, respect. These help provide context and perspective, along with meditation, yoga, and other practices.

I wish I could say I achieve balance, harmony, and unity using these behaviors 100 percent of the time. But actually I try for 90, even 95 percent. But that last five percent isn't pretty, like how I acted on the freeway. I realize there are times I will just lose it, when I am overwhelmed by anger and some really violent emotions. These typically happen when I'm stressed, fatigued, or simply haven't eaten for a long time. But I've also learned I can't just berate myself for being imperfect. That kind of flagellation creates its own circular system that is very difficult to escape. I've found that forgiveness is key to breaking that cycle of self-loathing. Recognizing that I am, as Nietzsche said, human, all too human, with feet of clay and head in the clouds.

Fortunately I don't have to be perfect as the arc of the unfolding of the spirit is long and spans many lifetimes. I will do the best I can to help move it along, and forgive myself those moments when I fail.

As Harmonists, our emblem is a blossoming flower; which to us is the earth itself. Flowers need to be nurtured. They will try and grow wherever they are planted or where their seed is cast, even among rocks. Poor soil, no soil, can stunt and even kill them. In fertile soil, with sunlight and water, they can grow close to achieving their full potential.

We look upon humans as being the gardeners of the planet, as being the planet's consciousness and conscience. As her consciousness, we aware of who and what we are; while being her conscience directs us to the ethical choices needed to make the garden grow and bloom. And the power we need to do such holy work comes directly from the spirit. We have the power to nurture, to serve, and to heal the planet, and what wonderful holy work that is. We have the power, in the words of one of my favorite Star Trek characters, to make it so.

Hymn No. 57

You and I are brought into being,

we are one.

So to bring vision and healing,

we are one.

The earth sees itself through us;

transforming in harmony.

We are one.

We are one.

 

Doubt was one of the defining words of the 20th century, and remains a defining word today. With roots in the 19th century and even earlier, the idea of doubt, not just doubting one's self but, indeed, the very nature of existence itself.

Part of that comes from the idea of impermanence, of the frightening feeling that it is impossible to gain footing in quicksand. Impermanence is a major characteristic of Buddhist teaching: "Great Faith and Great Doubt are two ends of a spiritual walking stick. We grip one end with the grasp given to us by our Great Determination. We poke into the underbrush in the dark on our spiritual journey. This act is real spiritual practice—gripping the Faith end and poking ahead with the Doubt end of the stick. If we have no Faith, we have no Doubt. If we have no Determination, we never pick up the stick in the first place."

Sensei Sevan Ross, director of the Chicago Zen Center.

https://www.learnreligions.com/faith-doubt-and-buddhism-449721

And in Hinduism as well:  “Having doubts is a hallmark of an active, questioning mind. Even though teachers may clarify doubts, other perplexities are bound to arise when a student engages with a problem deeply. Unfortunately, modern society does not necessarily provide a space for a doubting mind to come to terms with itself.”

Aruna Sankaranarayanan

https://www.thehindu.com/features/education/Doubt-ask-and-progress/article14017671.ece

In the European and Middle Eastern traditions, doubt is not always seen as sinful.

From the Jewish tradition:

Normally, we think of religious doubt as an obstacle to faith. From another perspective, it can be seen as a seed for deeper faith, a stimulus for religious growth.

R. Gil Student

https://www.torahmusings.com/2016/11/religious-doubt-in-jewish-life/

From the Christian perspective:

So why do so many Christians seem afraid of doubt? Perhaps they’re afraid of where the questions will lead. Christians have fallen into the trap of thinking that faith is blind, that doubt is the enemy of belief, or that doubters will inevitably lose their faith.

Philip Long 

https://www.cru.org/us/en/blog/spiritual-growth/devotionals-quiet-times/why-are-christians-afraid-of-doubt.html

“Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.”

Khalil Gibran.

And, finally, from one of my own human gods, Heraclitus, who seemed to know everything before anyone else had even thought of the questions.

“He who does not expect will not find out the unexpected, for it is trackless and unexplored.”

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Heraclitus

For me, that is the very nature of doubt. It is doubt that takes us to new places and expands who we are by putting us in touch with our potential, like the tree that lays dormant in a seed.

In the late 19th and early-to-mid-20th centuries, doubt became the very basis for one of the great schools of philosophy – existentialism – with Nietzsche, Kafka, and Camus as three of its guiding lights.

Friedrich Nietzsche

On doubt as sin: “Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.

Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality

"Belief in the truth commences with the doubting of all those 'truths'we once believed."

“Truth will have no gods before it . . . The belief in truth begins with the doubt of all truths in which one has previously believed.”

Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

“Not doubt, certainty is what drives one insane.”

“On the Genealogy of Morals”

Franz Kafka

“My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.”

“I am a memory come alive: autobiographical writings”

Albert Camus

“Doubts are the innermost corner of our souls. One must not talk about his doubts, whatever they may be.”

“Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest.”

“The absurd is a shadow cast over everything we do and even if we try to live life as if it has meaning as if there are reasons for doing things the absurd will linger in the back of our minds as a nagging doubt that perhaps there is no point.”

Notebooks, 1942-1951

One of the great experiences of my life was sitting at the Café de Flore on the Boulevard St. Germain in Paris, knowing we where Camus, Sartre and de Beauvoir had sat in the late '40s and 50's, smoking their (to me) foul-smelling Gauloise cigarettes, with James Baldwin perhaps joining them. We had an unexpectedly existentialist moment when three young American women sat nearby (we were at outside tables) and, shortly, demanded to know, in English, why they could not get wi-fi reception. The waiter was very patient. They ordered nothing but water, left no tip, and left. I had my own doubts at that point. Fortunately the cheese omelets were fabulous.

At the end of his life, in the last story of his last book, Exile and the Kingdom, Camus has a person helping to literally shoulder another's burden, in what seems to me a positive answer to doubt.

Coming to terms with doubt has also confronted many artists. Here are a few striking moments of doubt in art.

1. Fellini, at the end of La Strada, when the protagonist ends up desperately and hopelessly clutching handfuls of sand after he causes the inadvertent death of his innocent beloved.

2. Munch's The Scream, which is actually more about despair, but doubt can be a way station en route to despair.

https://www.artsy.net/artwork/edvard-munch-the-scream

3. Samuel Beckett, the Irish existentialist par excellence, from Waiting for Godot: Estragon: “You’re sure it was this evening?”

Vladimir: “What?”

Estragon: “That we were told to wait.”

Vladimir: “He said Saturday. (Pause.) I think.”

https://youtu.be/uvjoyEQZza4,

Fabulous casting with Zero Mostel and Burgress Meredith; broadcast in 1961 on television.

Start near the end at 1:35, with “I can't go on!” Of course, they go on.

4. The Danish composer Carl Nielsen, Symphony No. 6, the last movement.

https://youtu.be/SRLT5vq1weM

Start at Minute 23.

Nielson was attuned to what seemed nothing less than the unraveling of centuries of harmonic development in the 1920s and 1930s, when it seemed that total chaos was imminent. In this late work, he makes fun of what is happening and realizes that laughter can be, indeed, the best medicine, especially when one has no idea where things are going.

5. The American existentialist par excellence is filmmaker Woody Allen who, unlike his existentialist idol and Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman who returned to the Lutheran faith of his father late in life, has remained true to the nature of doubt and the basic questions of existence even to his most recent movie, “Rifkin's Festival,” where, after half a century of making movies, he's still asking the meaning of life.

Perhaps Allen's most existential movie was “Starlight Express,” shot in black and white, in which he portrays a famous filmmaker, Sandy Bates, who attends a retrospective in his honor and meets a high school classmate who demands to know why Bates made it to the top while he didn't. And Bates assures him it was just chance, the roll of the dice, which the man doesn't want to believe.

At the end, Bates wonders if the creation of art is one answer to life's most pressing questions. Sometimes just asking the question might be enough.

 The photos are in reverse order. Numbers in the article below refer to the pictures. 

PO 20 - A wooden letter “K' and the date, also in wood, of 1899 high in the front gable of the C.R. Kehler house in the village of Kehler.

PO 19 - Etched glass window over the front door of the C. R. Kehler house. 

PO 18 - H.H. Geist had this house constructed across the street from his store. Nearby resident Rick Stehr said the clay for the bricks, and the temporary wood-fired kiln used to fire them, were located down along the Mahantongo Creek at the site of a modern irrigation pond. 

PO 17 - A letterhead from H. H. Geist indicating his mercantile and business interests. Courtesy of the Rev. Carl Shankweiler.

PO 16 - A rare, hand-canceled post mark from the Kehler post office, showing the return address for the general store of postmaster H. H. Geist. Courtesy of the Rev. Carl Shankweiler.

PO 15 - The former Kehler post office and general store.

PO 14 - The finished building.

PO 14 C - A photograph of Brosius with his wife, Jane, daughter Minnie,

and son Charles, a rare example of a photographic image to go

with related documents that are 120 years old. It is also rare to see a doll

in a family photograph, in this case Minnie is holding a porcelain

doll, possibly from Germany, as Germany was a major exporter

of porcelain dolls to the United States at that time.

Courtesy of Ken Fetterolf.

PO 14 B - A 1903 postcard sent from Philadelphia to Haas. Courtesy of Rebecca Dietrich and Ken Fetterolf.

PO 14 A - A 1901 receipt from the Haas post office. Courtesy of Rebecca Dietrich and Ken Fetterolf.

PO 13 - New windows, new doors, new wood siding. 

PO 12 - Building a new and higher roof to provide more headroom upstairs.

PO 11 - The final moments before setting it down, with Glendon High and Johannes Zinzendorf jockeying it into position.

PO 10 - Jim Novinger gently lowers the general store into place. 

PO 9 - Backing in at the Hermitage.

PO 8 - Crossing the countryside. 

PO 7 - Heading up Mill Hill Road. 

PO 6 – The general store suspended in the air. We weren't sure it would stay intact after being lifted up.

 

PO 5 - With the asphalt siding and the roof removed, the building box is ready to be taken away.

PO 4 - The interior with its original shelving. The post office section was long-gone by the time we moved the structure. 

PO 3 - A tin hood and bricked iron kettle base indicates the basement was once used for butchering. The quality and age of the stone work indicates the cellar may have been used for an earlier building. 

PO 2 - The Haas general store and post office in “as found” condition.

PO 1 - “The Rough and Ready general store with owner Mr. Minnich.” From the Faye A. Kopp Photograph Collection of the Mahantongo Heritage Center.

A Tale of Two Post Offices

by Johannes Zinzendorf

By the late nineteenth century, practically every village of any size in the area had its own post office. These were not stand-alone buildings like modern post offices, but were typically located inside the local general store. A surprising number of them are left today. There's the stone building at Leck Kill that was Geist Store well into the 1990s. In fact, the original post office was still in the store, a kind of small wooden closet, with a door, a small desk, a small counter for transacting business, and lots of small, envelope-sized cubicles into which sorted mail was placed to the right recipient.

The Rough and Ready general store and post office, though greatly modified, remains as well, and there is even a rare period photograph of the interior showing its owner, Mr. Minnich, standing in front of shelves loaded with canned goods, and glass bottles of condiments, including the ubiquitous Heinz catsup.

PO 1

At the upper end of the valley, the villages of Haas and Kehler also had combination general stores and post offices and they also remain: the Kehler store at its original location, while the Haas post office was moved, intact, to the Hermitage a mile west from the village.

PO 2

It was a comment by Haas resident David Knerr that resulted in saving the village's combined general store and post office. I work with Dave on the Hepler Reunion committee, and with a shared interest in local history, he told me the original post office was still standing across the street from his house.

PO 3

Intrigued, I visited the building that I had passed, literally, hundreds of times over the past thirty years without even noticing it. In my defense, I will say that it sat back a hundred feet from Creek Road in a stand of evergreen trees. It also was not the kind of early valley log or timber-frame structure that we had been moving to the Hermitage.

Still, Bro. Christian and I had been looking for a new exhibit building and when I looked inside, I saw its walls were lined with shelves. Oh yes, I thought, this will do nicely.

The building was in dilapidated condition, having been used many years for storage. Owner David Kehler was glad to let the building go for salvage as he wanted to get rid of it.

The cut stone used in the basement indicated the possibility that it was actually older than the store above it. Knerr said the Hepler family, who owned much of the area at that time, had its own stone mason, so perhaps an earlier foundation was reused. A round, tin hood in the ceiling of the basement, with a chimney pipe leading to the outside, and a brick stove base for a cast iron butcher kettle, showed the basement was used for butchering at one time.

PO 4

Many generations of bats had lived within the frame walls, and we got buckets of fertile guano for the garden, all nicely dried.

PO 5

What wasn't dry was the interior board ceiling and floor, because the asphalt roof had evidently leaked for decades, but rotted wood can be replaced.

We decided to move the building intact on a flat-bed trailer, except for removing the roof so it would fit under electric and phone lines. We hired Jim Novinger of Herndon, a skilled crane operator, to lift the structure and place it on a flat bed trailer. Glendon High, of Pitman, and his cousin Skylar High, brought the building to the Hermitage, where Novinger set up his crane again and set the building onto its new foundation.

PO 6

PO 7

PO 8

PO 9

PO 10

PO 11

PO 12

After that, it was a process of rebuilding the roof, making the side walls two feet higher than they originally were, to provide more head room and exhibit space upstairs. All new plates, the long side beams into which the rafters are placed, and all new rafters, were installed and then a new metal roof was put on. We completely replaced the old, rough-cut exterior boards with new, locally-sourced, fourteen-foot pine boards supplied by Leck Kill saw miller Eugene Heim. We planed them smooth first before installing them, to give the building a more finished look and that would be easier to paint.

PO 13

We found tongue-and-groove ceiling boards and hardwood flooring to replace rotted sections, and we completely replastered the interior as most of what was still on the walls when we got the building fell off during the jostling to the Hermitage, and the remainder was a dreary and dirty shade of gray.

PO 14

Bro. Christian built new letter cubbies for the restored post office area at the back of the building, and even has a newly made Haas stamp (from Ukraine, of all places) to postmark letters and cards.

Finally, the building was completely restored, complete with wood frame windows salvaged from a demolished house in the area, and painted. It will be available for tours by appointment beginning in June.

There are only two known documents that are related to the Haas post office, so it evidently was not a busy place. The first is a receipt for a registered letter mailed by E. W. Brosius on February 19, 1901 and signed by postmaster D. H. Smith, postmaster at the time. The letter was sent to Rockford, Illinois.

PO 14 A

According to Dave Knerr, Daniel Smith - a great-great-grandfather -was the last postmaster. The post office remained in business until April 30, 1909, when service moved to Pitman.

The second document is a post card mailed from Philadelphia, with a Philadelphia postmark, and addressed to Ellsworth Brosius. 

Both of these documents have also come down in the family, with Ellsworth being the great-grandfather of Rebecca Dietrich, and the great-great-grandfather of Ken Fetterolf. According to Ken, Ellsworth was a farmer, a sawmill operator, and a township supervisor, and so a man who could certainly need to send certified mail.

PO 14 B

PO 14 C

There is no known postmark from the Haas post office, though one may exist. 

Long-time philatelic expert, the Rev. Carl Shankweiler of Valley View, has a reference book for all the post offices in the state, and it shows that the Haas post office was opened on June 22, 1883, with J. Geist as postmaster. He probably operated the general store as well, which may also have opened in 1883.

Interestingly enough, the Kehler post office also opened on June 22, 1883 and its postmaster was H.H. Geist, surely related in some way to J. Geist at Haas. He also operated the general store, whose building still remains. The Kehler post office was closed just slightly earlier than the one in Haas, on March 31, 1909, evidently in some kind of consolidation of service to Pitman where, fortunately, it has remained.

Shankweiler has a canceled envelope from Kehler in his collection, and it was canceled simply by writing the village name across the stamps. Shankweiler said this practice was common in small post offices that didn't deal with a lot of mail and, therefore, the postmaster didn't have to spend money to buy a hand stamp and ink pad, which would be faster and more practical in a post office that handled a larger volume of mail. Below the handwritten name of Kehler is the date of the cancellation, 11-10-98, or November 10, 1898.

PO 15

H.H. Geist used the return address section on the envelope to advertise his business. It says he was a “Dealer in Dry Goods, Notions, Boots, Shoes, Hats, Caps, Groceries, Provisions, and Merchandise Generally. Sewing Machines a Speciality.” And the address is simply, “Kehler, Schuylkill County, PA.”

PO 16

Those items neatly summarize the contents of practically every general store in the area. The reference to sewing machines is interesting because in the 1990s, then-owner John Heim took us through the store, used only for storage at that time, and actually gave us a treadle Singer sewing machine that was still in the building and, possibly, an unsold remnant of those offered by Geist.

H. H. Geist had other business interests as well, as indicated by a letterhead in the envelope that is also in Shankweiler's collection. It says, “Office of H.H. Geist, Dealer in General Merchandise, Shipper of Butter, Eggs and Farmers' Product, Shipping Station, Ashland Station.” This letterhead was mailed in the envelope and was addressed to a Jonas Knoll of Lebanon, Pennsylvania. In the letter, Geist orders a washing machine “with extra good casting and woodwork” for which he encloses a check for $12.50. He requests Knoll to send it to Ashland Station, one of the closest railheads to the upper Mahantongo Valley and where it seems that Geist had another office. It is not known whether this washing machine was for Geist's home or something to be sold in his Kehler store.

PO 17

Geist lived across the road, in a two-story brick house, one of the few at the upper end of the valley.

PO 18

The village was named for another local entrepreneur, C. R. Kehler. Rick Stehr now lives in Kehler's elegant late-Victorian home. Kehler had his name etched in glass above the front door.

PO 19

There is also a wooden cutout of the letter “K” high in the peak of the front gable, and a date, also in wood, of 1899.

PO 20

Kehler owned and operated an extensive butchering and meat operation in the village. However, it was the livestock operation – Stehr said there were extensive animal pens for both cattle and hogs – that gave the village its earlier Pennsylvania Dutch name of Kelvaschtettle, or Calf Town.

However, H.H. Geist was not the last person to operate the general store. Stehr said his grandfather, Earl Stehr, operated it for some time after World War II. Following a mining accident, Stehr found factory work in Philadelphia during the war making precision machine parts and moved his family there. After the war, Stehr and his family returned to Kehler, which was when he, for some time, reopened the store, continuing to sell general merchandise and also cut hair, though Rick Stehr emphasizes it was not a regular barber shop. Earl Stehr also sold cigars there, and Rick recalls that, as a boy, his father, the late Albert Stehr, and other lads would steal cigars and smoke them.

Once, Earl saw the boys riding a mule and later told them it looked to him like the mule was smoking going over the hill.

Rick Stehr said his father later returned to machine work in Philadelphia, and other local men went down there with him, like the late Ralph Hepler, who eventually bought the brick house of H. H. Geist in Kehler. The men would stay in Philadelphia during the week and come back on the weekends. Eventually, Earl Stehr retired from the plant.

During the years the general store was closed, the building itself was used for potato storage in the cellar and an adjacent building constructed for that purpose, and even turkeys were raised on the second floor.

Pitman native Jim Hepler recalls playing pool as a teenager in the store in the late 1960s, when Bill Heim, whose father John Heim owned the building by that time and who lived next door, found a pool table and set it up the former store. So the building resounded to a call rare in the Mahantongo Valley of “Rack 'em up!” Hepler emphasized that the building was not a pool hall as such, but simply a place to hang out.

Today, the building is used for storage by Walter Rebuck, who was raised by John Heim.

Eventually, as with many other businesses in the area, general stores found it impossible to compete with larger operations outside the valley who could offer greater variety at better prices. People's driving habits also changed drastically as everyone had a car and it became increasingly easier to go out of the valley for supplies. Nowadays, of course, many of our purchases are delivered to us.

The restored Haas post office and general store will be available for tours by appointment at the Hermitage beginning in June.