Lead me, Father, out of harm
    To the quiet Zoar farm
      If it be Thy will.

So sang another group of simple German separatists, of whom some three hundred came to America from Wuerttemberg in 1817, under the leadership of Joseph Bimeler (Baeumeler) and built the village of Zoar in Tuscarawas County, Ohio.  They acquired five thousand acres of land and signed articles of association in April, 1819, turning all their individual property and all their future earnings into a common fund to be managed by an elected board of directors.  The community provided its members with their daily necessities and two suits of clothes a year.  The members were assigned to various trades which absorbed all their time and left them very little strength for amusement or reading.  Their one recreation was singing.  The society was bound to celibacy until the marriage of Bimeler to his housekeeper; thereafter marriage was permitted but not encouraged.

In 1832 the society was incorporated under the laws of Ohio, and until its dissolution it was managed as a corporation.  A few Germans joined the society.  No American ever requested admission.  Joseph Bimeler was elected Agent General and thereby became the chosen as well as the natural leader of the community.  Like other patriarchs of that epoch who led their following into the wilderness, he was a man of some education and many gifts.  He was the spiritual mentor; but his piety, which was sincere and simple, did not rob him of the shrewdness necessary to material success.  His followers were loyally devoted to him.  They built for him the largest house in the community, a fine colonial manor house, where he dwelt in comparative luxury and reigned as their “King.”  When he died in 1853 he had seen the prosperity of his colony reach its zenith.  It remained small.  Scarcely more than three hundred members ever dwelt in the village which, in spite of its profusion of vines and flowers, lacked the informal quaintness and originality of Rapp’s Economy.  The Tuscarawas River furnished power for their flour mill, whose products were widely sought.  There was also a woolen mill, a planing mill, a foundry, and a machine shop.  The beer made by the community was famous all the country round, and for a time its pottery and tile works turned out interesting and quaint products.  But one by one these small industries succumbed to the competition of the greater world.  At last even an alien brew supplanted the good local beer.  When the railroad tapped the village, and it was incorporated (1884) and assumed an official worldliness with its mayor and councilmen, it lost its isolation, summer visitors flocked in, and a “calaboose” was needed for the benefit of the sojourners!