The Hidden Town: Slavery Inside Old Salem
Near Winston Salem, North Carolina
Old Salem presents itself as a Moravian town, and it is. But for much of its history, it was also something else: a slaveholding community.
The early Moravians had a rule against individual ownership of enslaved people. The church itself, not individual congregants, controlled all property, and in the earliest years, enslaved labor was limited and subject to church oversight. But as Salem grew, and as the surrounding region became more deeply integrated into the Southern plantation economy, the rules bent.
The church began hiring enslaved people from neighboring landowners, then purchasing enslaved people outright. By the time of the Civil War, roughly one hundred thirty-five of Salem's residents were enslaved, living in what archaeologists and archivists have since called the hidden town: a network of at least thirty-five separate dwelling places, mostly small structures behind the main buildings where enslaved workers cooked, cleaned, processed tobacco, tended livestock, and built much of what visitors see preserved today.
Those dwelling places were not shown to visitors when Old Salem opened as a museum in the early nineteen fifties. The first interpretation focused almost entirely on white male Moravian craftsmen. Women's histories were gradually added over the following decades. The history of enslaved people was not publicly confronted until the nineteen eighties, and not actively researched until the Hidden Town Project began in twenty sixteen.
That project located thirty-five enslaved dwelling sites using archaeological survey and documentary records. It recovered some life details of Peter Oliver, an Afro-Moravian man who was free by eighteen hundred, married, and leased a small farm near the town, one of the very few Black men documented within the community's social framework.
The fuller story of the enslaved people who built Old Salem is still being recovered. Much of it may never be fully known. The records go quiet in ways that are themselves a kind of record.
