Old Salem: The Theocratic Town That Time Preserved
Near Winston Salem, North Carolina
Salem was not built like other American towns. There was no land rush, no speculator surveying lots for quick profit. The Moravians planned Salem the way they planned everything: communally, religiously, deliberately.
From seventeen sixty-six onward, the town took shape around a central square, Salem Square, with the congregation hall on the north side and the main street running south. Buildings were assigned by the church elders, not purchased by individuals. Each trade needed church approval. Marriage required a congregational vote. Even the choice of a husband was sometimes settled by lot, a small piece of paper drawn from a cup to determine whether God approved the union.
The Moravians were not Puritans. They valued music, art, craft, and education. They were German-speaking Protestants who traced their roots to Jan Hus, a Bohemian reformer burned at the stake in fourteen fifteen, a hundred years before Luther nailed his theses to a church door. In that sense, Moravians were the first Protestants, and they carried an unusually intentional sense of what a godly community should look like.
By the early eighteen hundreds, Salem was the economic capital of the North Carolina piedmont. Its craftsmen, tanners, gunsmiths, potters, and tavern-keepers served a vast backcountry. Salem College opened in seventeen seventy-two as a school for girls, making it one of the oldest women's educational institutions in the country, and it still operates on its original grounds today.
The arrival of industrial Winston next door and the merger of nineteen thirteen changed Salem's character gradually. But the physical bones of the old town survived. In nineteen fifty, a preservation group called Old Salem Incorporated began buying and restoring threatened buildings. Today, roughly seventy percent of the structures in the historic district are original. The district was declared a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-six.
Walk into Salem Square today and you are standing on ground that has not been substantially altered in two hundred and fifty years. That is unusual anywhere in America.
