The Twin City: Where Salem Met Winston

You are passing through one of the more unusual cities in America: a place that is technically two towns fused into one, and whose identity was shaped by a religious utopia, an industrial empire, and a twenty-six-mile railroad spur that changed everything.

Salem was here first. Moravian settlers arrived in November of seventeen fifty-three, walking south from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and claiming a tract of land they called Wachovia, nearly one hundred thousand acres of Carolina piedmont that the Moravian Church had purchased from a British lord. Their central town, Salem, was laid out in seventeen sixty-six as a planned community organized around a church square, a philosophy, and a theocratic economy: every trade, every building, every marriage required approval of the congregation elders.

Then, in eighteen forty-nine, Forsyth County was carved out of Stokes County, and a new county seat, later named Winston, was planted just north of the Moravian town. For decades, the two communities existed side by side but governed separately. Winston was industrial, pragmatic, full of tobacco warehouses and a railroad depot. Salem held tightly to its Moravian character, its stone church, its communal ethic.

In nineteen thirteen, after years of political argument, the two towns merged into a single municipality. The hyphen in Winston-Salem is not decorative. It is a diplomatic compromise, a record of the negotiation between a planned Pietist village and a raw American industrial town.

Today, those two personalities still pull at each other. The historic district of Old Salem preserves the Moravian side. A short drive north, the glass towers and research labs of the Innovation Quarter announce what Winston's tobacco money eventually became.

This is a city built twice, by people with very different ideas about what a city should be.