Ephrata is the largest borough in our corner of northern Lancaster County, with close to fourteen thousand residents packed into about three and a half square miles. It's also home to a group of buildings that predate the American Revolution by more than three decades and still stand, a short walk from Main Street.
A town that grew up around a cloister
Johann Conrad Beissel founded the Ephrata Cloister in 1732 on the banks of the Cocalico Creek, a semimonastic community of celibate brothers and sisters with a married congregation living around them. At its height it held around 80 celibate members and a couple hundred householders. The monastic life ended when the last celibate member died in 1813, but the buildings stayed, and the Commonwealth took over the grounds in 1941. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission still runs it today.
The Cloister's surviving buildings, put up between roughly 1740 and 1746, are described in their National Register nomination as the most markedly German and medieval of all the colonial-era architecture in Pennsylvania. The Saal, the sisters' meeting house, has a hewn oak half-timber frame infilled with stone and covered in hand-hewn weatherboards. The Saron next to it is a four-story building under a steep shingled roof. The site was named a National Historic Landmark in 1967.
The community also ran the second German-language printing press in the colonies, and excavations have shown the Cloister served as a hospital during the Revolutionary War.
We don't touch the Cloister, obviously, and nobody should be putting vinyl windows in a building like that. But it sets the tone for the rest of the borough. Ephrata has a long memory, and a lot of homeowners here care about keeping an older house looking like an older house, even when the windows inside it need to start performing like modern ones.
Main Street, the railroad, and what got built around them
Ephrata became a borough in 1891, and its downtown filled in over the decades that followed, with U.S. Route 322 running straight through the center as Main Street and the Reading and Columbia Railroad carrying passengers through downtown until 1952. The Ephrata Commercial Historic District is listed on the National Register, and some of its anchors are easy to spot: the Beaux-Arts Ephrata National Bank building, designed by C. Emlen Urban and finished in 1925, and the Main Theater, which opened in 1938. Before all that, Ephrata was something of a resort town, home to the Mountain Springs Hotel at Main and Spring Garden Streets, which stood empty for years before most of it came down in 2004.
For us, that history means the neighborhoods closest to Main Street are where the older openings are: double-hung windows that may have been replaced once already, sometimes badly, and entry doors set into frames that have shifted over the better part of a century. On a house like that, we measure every opening on site and decide between an insert and a full-frame window replacement based on what the frame actually looks like, not what the house down the street needed. Further out, the newer development around the edges of the borough is a more straightforward job, standard openings and builder-grade units that are often due for an upgrade rather than a rescue.
Not every older window here needs to come out, either. A sash that won't stay up, a broken pane, or a failed seal is often a window repair, and the same goes for an entry door that just needs weatherstripping and an adjusted strike plate rather than a whole new unit. Our repair or replace page walks through how we make that call, and if your house is one of the older ones near downtown, our guide to replacing windows in an old house covers what's different about the work. The older homes page is worth a read too, including the part about lead paint, since any house built before 1978 may have it somewhere in the trim.
Frequently asked questions
Does the Ephrata Commercial Historic District limit what windows or doors I can install?
A National Register listing on its own doesn't usually restrict what a private homeowner can do, but local rules are a separate question. If your property is in or near the downtown district, check with the borough before we order anything, and tell us what you find so we can work within it.
My house near Main Street already has replacement windows that don't fit well. Can you fix that?
Often, yes. A lot of older Ephrata houses have had at least one earlier round of replacements, and poorly sized inserts are a common problem. We measure the original openings and either correct the fit or recommend a full-frame replacement if the frame itself has gone soft.
How far is Ephrata from your shop?
About twenty minutes from East Earl, straight up Route 322, so it's one of the quicker drives on our route.