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They should make it it a bed and breakfast

PITMAN, Pa. — They slept in the barn their first winter, on a straw mattress with antique linen sheets and a feather tick. There was no electricity, heat or plumbing, so they made their own candles, used a chamber pot and drew water from a spring.

They were born Michael Colby and Donald Graves, but once there, on 63 acres in the Mahantongo Valley, a bowl of land in central Pennsylvania, they changed their names to Christian and Johannes Zinzendorf and called themselves the Harmonists, inspired by a splinter group of 18th-century Moravian brothers who believed in the spiritual values of an agrarian life.

Their ideals were lofty but simple: They would live off the land, farming with Colonial-era tools, along with a band of like-minded men dressed in homespun robes wielding scythes and pickaxes. They would sleep in atmospheric log cabins and other 18th-century structures that they had rescued from the area and that they began to reconstruct, painstakingly, brick by crumbling brick and log by log.

But what if you built a commune, and no one came?

It turns out it’s not so easy to cook up a utopia from scratch. There are 1,775 so-called intentional communities listed in the Fellowship for Intentional Community’s United States directory: eco-villages, pagan co-ops, faith-based retreats and everything in between. But how do you advertise, organize and thrive? “Don’t ask us,” Johannes said. “We failed that class.”

It was a raw, bright afternoon in April. Christian and Johannes, or to be accurate (stay with me here) Zephram and Johannes (Christian changed his name again when he realized the hoped-for brotherhood was never going to materialize, and his new last name is de Colebi), are now 65 and 64. And they have reconfigured their life here for the third time in three decades.

The 25 buildings that dot the landscape are mostly dormant, save for Zephram’s house and Johannes’s house. The two have been living separately, so to speak, for a decade, individual housing being an unlooked-for boon when their commune went to pieces and they ceased to be a couple.

They’ve sold most of their antique tools, save for a handful, which they’ve added to the collection of furniture, housewares, paintings, textiles and other Pennsylvania Dutch relics they’ve amassed over the years. The two have turned the whole lot — thousands of artifacts — into a museum, filling the cavernous barn where they spent their first winter with exhibits.

They’ve written a memoir, tragicomic, of course, and are looking for a publisher.

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