Bethabara: The First House in the Wilderness
Near Winston Salem, North Carolina
Fifteen men set out on foot in the fall of seventeen fifty-three. They had come from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and they were heading south into the Carolina back-country on a mission assigned by the Moravian Church: find the Wachovia tract, a hundred thousand acres their church had purchased sight-unseen, and build the first settlement.
They arrived on November seventeenth and found an abandoned hunters cabin. They took shelter there, gave thanks, and named the place Bethabara, a Hebrew word meaning house of passage. They meant it as a temporary stop. It would become something more.
Over the next two decades, the settlers at Bethabara built more than seventy-five structures: homes, a forge, a pottery, a tannery, a tavern, a mill, and gardens producing over fifty varieties of medicinal herbs. The settlement quickly became the economic center of the Carolina piedmont back-country. Trading caravans came from hundreds of miles away. During the French and Indian War, the Moravians built a palisade around the town, and their neutrality and skill as healers made Bethabara a refuge for settlers of all backgrounds fleeing the conflict.
But Bethabara's founders always knew the town was a placeholder. In seventeen sixty-six, they broke ground on Salem, their planned central city, a few miles to the south. Within a generation, Bethabara shrank as residents transferred to the new town. It eventually faded into farmland.
That farmland is what saved it. Because nothing was built over the original settlement, archaeologists excavating in the nineteen sixties found the foundations of the early town essentially intact beneath the soil. What you can see today at Historic Bethabara Park are those excavated foundations, a reconstructed palisade fence, colonial gardens, and the restored Gemeinhaus church, all still sitting quietly in a one-hundred-eighty-three-acre preserve.
Bethabara was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen ninety-nine. It is one of the most completely preserved eighteenth-century Moravian sites in the world, and it is here, not in the tourist-ready streets of Old Salem, that the original wilderness story began.
