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—not exactly seeking converts to a religion but followers of her as an avatar of God. While in Philadelphia, the Friend came under the influence of at least one close admirer with ties to the mystical commune at Ephrata in Lancaster County. The commune had been founded in 1732 by Johann Conrad Beissel, a dynamic successor to the Rhine Valley mystic Kelpius. Like the Ephratans, the Friend came to reject the formality of church services, liturgy, confessions of faith, and vows. She adopted the Ephratan practice of identifying the Sabbath on Saturday. Also like the German mystics from Lancaster, she encouraged—but stopped short of demanding—celibacy among her followers. If anything, the Friend’s appeal was characterized by its almost total lack of hardened doctrine. She relied instead upon the lessons of Scripture and a simple do-unto-others ethic. Indeed, the Friend’s teachings—in contrast to her fantastic claims about herself—could seem downright ordinary, extending to the virtues of punctuality and good-neighborliness.

Unlike the intense devotees around Mother Ann Lee, the Friend attracted a milder circle of landowners, merchants, and gentry. Shakerism, by contrast, was always running afoul of authorities as a migrant British movement whose converts came largely from the rear pews: kitchen maids, hired hands, and hardscrabble farmers. Followers of Mother Ann were once jailed simply on a rumor that they were driving sheep into British-held territory. The Universal Friend, on the other hand, moved freely around Rhode Island during the Revolutionary War, preaching to both American and English troops. Even when the Friend did end up in court after the war, the results were almost comical. In a dispute with an angry ex-follower, the Friend was dragged before a Central New York circuit court on charges of blasphemy, only to hear the presiding judge calmly inform the parties that blasphemy was not an indictable offense in the new republic. In a tale that would be dismissible as legend were it not on public record, Judge Morgan Lewis—later the governor of New York—then invited the Friend to preach before the court and applauded her “good counsel.” It was a reception Mother Ann never could have dreamed of.

Pioneer Prophetess

After learning about the success of Ephrata, the Friend’s followers began to discuss creating a colony of their own. By late 1788, a cluster of devotees journeyed from New England to the lakes of Central New York to break ground on a settlement to house the Universal Friend. In so doing, followers of the “pioneer prophetess,” as Wilkinson’s impeccable twentieth-century biographer Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr., dubbed her, became some of the earliest white settlers of Central New York. Their community of Jerusalem eventually grew near Crooked Lake—now called Keuka Lake. It continues to stand as an incorporated town today, a place in which family names belonging to the Friend’s earliest followers still appear in the local telephone directory.

Many Central New Yorkers harbored conflicting attitudes toward their spirit-possessed pioneer, who cut a theatrical presence in her trademark cape and wide-brimmed hat. Their ambivalence resulted in a wide range of tall tales that depicted the Friend as a shrewd operator of slightly ill repute. One story of the Friend is as deeply ingrained in the folklore of New York State as is the legend of the Headless Horseman. Like many folktales, its location changes with nearly every recitation, the setting variously put at the banks of Seneca or Keuka Lake, or on bodies of water stretching as far north as Rhode Island or as far south as the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia. It gets repeated today on the tidy main street of the Central New York town of Penn Yan, near Jerusalem, where one teller sincerely placed the story at a canal at the end of the road. Based on prevailing versions, it goes this way:

One morning, the Friend led a band of followers to a lakeshore, where she preached to them on the powers of faith. She built to a fiery conclusion and then proclaimed she was going to