Before dawn on Easter morning, a brass band walks the brick streets of Old Salem playing chorales into the dark. By the time the musicians reach God’s Acre, the graveyard where every flat stone lies the same size, thousands of people are waiting in the cold. A minister steps forward and says the words his church has said here since 1772. Then the sun comes up, and the trombones answer it.
This is the rhythm the Moravians in Winston-Salem have kept for more than 250 years: a town built around a church, a year marked by music, a habit of writing everything down. They did not arrive as refugees scattered by chance. They came as a single congregation, sent on purpose, to build one planned town in the Carolina backcountry, and that town is still standing.
Winston-Salem: The Place
Winston-Salem sits in Forsyth County in the rolling Piedmont of central North Carolina, between the Blue Ridge to the west and the coastal plain to the east. The original Moravian town of Salem occupies the high ground just south of downtown, its tidy lots running off South Main Street. Two hours northeast of Charlotte and ninety minutes west of the Research Triangle, the city pairs eighteenth-century brick houses with the brick smokestacks of the tobacco age.
How Winston-Salem Became a Moravian Town
Before the Moravians
The land that became Wachovia was Granville District backcountry, part of the vast holdings of John Carteret, the second Earl Granville, who had kept his share of the old Carolina proprietary. In the early 1750s it was thinly settled frontier, ranged by Cherokee and Catawba hunters and a scatter of European squatters. Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg surveyed it for the church in the winter of 1752, and at the start of 1753 he recorded that the land seemed reserved by Providence for the Brethren.
The Brethren in question were old. The Unitas Fratrum, the Unity of the Brethren, had formed in 1457 among the Bohemian and Moravian followers of the reformer Jan Hus, who had been burned at the stake in 1415, a full century before Martin Luther. Crushed in the Counter-Reformation, the survivors found shelter in 1722 on the Saxon estate of Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, where they rebuilt their church in a village they called Herrnhut, “the Lord’s watch.” From Herrnhut the renewed church sent missionaries and settlers across the Atlantic.
The Moravians Arrive
In 1753 the church bought almost 100,000 acres from Lord Granville, with the deeds signed in London on August 7. The price came to roughly thirty-five cents an acre. They named the tract Wachovia, after a valley on Zinzendorf’s ancestral lands in Austria, and set about settling it from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the church’s American hub.
On November 17, 1753, fifteen single men who had walked the wagon road south from Bethlehem reached an abandoned cabin on Wachovia and named the spot Bethabara, “house of passage.” It was meant to be temporary, a working camp until the real town could be laid out. It lasted longer than planned and grew a stockade during the French and Indian War, sheltering frightened settlers from miles around. A second farming village, Bethania, followed in 1759.
The town the whole enterprise had been pointing toward broke ground in February 1766. The church chose a central ridge, drew a formal plan with a square at its heart, and named it Salem, from the Hebrew for peace. This was to be the trade and craft center for all of Wachovia, a true congregation town where the church did not merely worship but governed.
Winston-Salem at Its Peak
For its first century Salem ran without a mayor or a council. Two boards did the work: the Aeltesten Conferenz tended the spiritual life of the community, and the Aufseher Collegium managed its material affairs, from prices to property. The land belonged to the church and was leased, not sold, to members in good standing. Big decisions, including many marriages, the choice of leaders, and whether to admit an outsider, were submitted to the lot, a draw of chance the Moravians read as the will of God. The church kept the lot for marriages until 1818.
Daily life ran through the choir system, which had nothing to do with singing. Members were grouped by age, sex, and marital status into choirs of single brothers, single sisters, married people, widows, widowers, boys, and girls. Several choirs lived together under one roof. The Single Brothers shared a house and a common economy; so did the Single Sisters across the square.
Then the world arrived next door. In 1849 the Salem Congregation sold land just to the north for the seat of the new Forsyth County, and the rough new town was named Winston in 1851 for Joseph Winston, a Revolutionary War officer. Winston had no religious rules and every appetite for industry. By the 1880s it was thick with tobacco factories, and R. J. Reynolds was building the company that would make Camel cigarettes and turn an inland town into a national port of entry for Turkish leaf and French paper.
For decades Salem and Winston grew toward each other across a single dividing street, one quiet and consecrated, the other loud and ambitious. In 1913 the voters settled it. The two towns merged into a single city, Winston-Salem, and by 1920 it was the largest city in North Carolina.
The Change
The merger ended Salem as a separate place, and the twentieth century nearly finished off its fabric. As industry pulled life downtown and out to the suburbs, the old Moravian quarter slid into neglect, its eighteenth-century houses cut up into apartments or eyed for demolition. A through street and a supermarket were proposed where the congregation town had stood.
The reaction came from the city itself. In 1948 Winston-Salem created a local historic district to protect what remained, among the first such districts in the country. In 1950 the nonprofit Old Salem Inc. began buying and restoring buildings, peeling later additions off the originals and reopening the trades. The church kept worshipping the entire time. The restoration did not invent Salem; it rescued one that had never quite stopped running.
The Landmarks of Old Salem
Home Moravian Church (Salem Square, 529 South Church Street) anchors the town. The congregation first used this brick sanctuary on November 9, 1800, and from its balcony the bands still gather before the Easter dawn. It remains the mother church of the Moravian Southern Province, and its bell and trombone choir set the calendar for the whole community.
The Single Brothers’ House (600 South Main Street, at Academy Street) is the most striking survivor of the choir system. Master mason Melchior Rasp and carpenter Christian Triebel raised its half-timbered original in 1769, and Johann Gottlob Krause added the all-brick wing in 1786. Inside it, unmarried men lived, worshipped, ate, and learned their trades, and behind it the brothers ran a brewery, tannery, distillery, and slaughterhouse as a single shared enterprise.
Winkler Bakery (525 South Main Street) has been turning out the same goods for more than two centuries. The church built a bakery on the spot in 1799, and in 1807 a Swiss-born baker named Christian Winkler bought it; his family kept it until 1926. Its wood-fired brick oven, deep enough to walk into, still bakes the sugar cake, lovefeast buns, and paper-thin Moravian cookies that scholars cite as a rare case of unbroken American culinary tradition.
Salem College and Academy (601 South Church Street) grew from the Little Girls’ School the Moravians opened in April 1772, with Elisabeth Oesterlein as its first teacher. The Moravians believed girls deserved real schooling, and the institution became a boarding school in 1802 and a degree-granting college by the end of the century. It is counted among the oldest educational institutions for women in the United States and is still in session.
St. Philips Moravian Church (911 South Church Street) tells the part of Salem’s story the town owes the most honesty. The African Moravian congregation was organized on May 5, 1822, among members who were mostly enslaved, alongside free Black members. They worshipped in a log church from 1823, and the brick sanctuary that still stands was consecrated on December 15, 1861, making it the oldest African American church building in North Carolina. On May 21, 1865, a Union cavalry chaplain stood in that church and read the announcement of freedom to the people in the pews.
God’s Acre, the Moravian graveyard above Cedar Avenue, holds thousands of identical flat stones, the same for the rich and the poor, the elder and the child. Moravians read the cemetery as a field where the body is sown to be raised, and they sweep and decorate it for Easter. It is the destination of the pre-dawn march, the place where the brass plays from the four corners as the sun comes up.
Where the Moravians Came From
The deepest roots run to the lands of the old Bohemian crown, Bohemia and Moravia in what is now the Czech Republic, where the Unitas Fratrum first organized in 1457. Driven underground by persecution, the church found new life in German-speaking Saxony at Herrnhut after 1722, and from then on most Moravian settlers spoke German and carried Central European custom with them.
The men who built Salem did not come straight from Europe. They came down the wagon road from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the Moravian center already established in the colonies, sent south by the church the way a company posts staff to a new branch. That is the unusual thing about this migration. It was not flight; it was deployment, a single denomination planting a single town according to a plan drawn in advance. It puts Salem in the company of other faith-built American places, from the Quaker founding of Philadelphia to the Mormon settlement of Salt Lake City, and a short drive north into Pennsylvania from the Plain communities of Lancaster County.
Winston-Salem Today
The Moravian Church is still here, still small, and still keeping the calendar. More than two dozen congregations across the region hold Christmas Eve lovefeasts, where ushers carry trays of sweet buns and milky coffee down the pews and, near the end, hand each worshipper a lit beeswax candle trimmed with a red paper ruffle. The Easter sunrise service at God’s Acre, unbroken since 1772, is described as the longest-running observance of its kind in the country, and the bands still wake the city at two in the morning to play it in.
You can see the Moravians without entering a church. The many-pointed Moravian star, brought to Salem in the early 1900s from German Moravian schools, hangs from porches all over Winston-Salem through the dark months, not only in the historic district. Old Salem Museums and Gardens keeps the trades alive on South Main Street, and Winkler Bakery sells sugar cake to people who have no idea it is a sacrament of sorts.
What survives here is not a theme park and not a ruin. It is a working town that a church laid out in 1766 and never abandoned, where the same congregation still consecrates the same graveyard and the trombones still find the same notes. The Moravians in Winston-Salem built for permanence, and the bet is still paying out.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Moravians settle in Winston-Salem?
The Moravians in Winston-Salem came on purpose, not by accident. In 1753 their church bought nearly 100,000 acres of North Carolina backcountry from Lord Granville and named it Wachovia, intending to build a self-governing congregation town. They founded Bethabara that year and laid out the planned town of Salem in 1766 as the trade and craft center for the whole tract.
Is Winston-Salem still a Moravian town today?
Yes, though it is no longer governed by the church. The Moravians in Winston-Salem still run more than two dozen congregations, holding lovefeasts each Christmas and the Easter sunrise service that has continued unbroken since 1772. The Moravian star on porches all over the city each winter is the most visible sign that the tradition is still alive.
What are the most famous Moravian landmarks in Old Salem?
The best known are Home Moravian Church on Salem Square, used since 1800, and the Single Brothers’ House of 1769, where unmarried men lived and worked under the choir system. Winkler Bakery, established in 1807, still bakes in a wood-fired oven, and St. Philips Moravian Church is the oldest African American church building in North Carolina.
Where did the Moravians come from?
Their church, the Unitas Fratrum, began in 1457 in Bohemia and Moravia, in today’s Czech Republic, among the followers of the reformer Jan Hus. After persecution scattered them, they regrouped at Herrnhut in Saxony in 1722. The settlers who built Salem traveled down from the Moravian center at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
When did the Moravians first arrive in North Carolina?
The first fifteen Moravian settlers reached Wachovia on November 17, 1753, after walking south from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and founded the village of Bethabara. The central town of Salem was begun in 1766. Salem and the neighboring town of Winston merged into the single city of Winston-Salem in 1913.
If your family’s story passed through a town that a faith built on purpose, through Salem’s brick lots or the wagon road down from Bethlehem, the names and dates are still there to be traced.