Emmaus, Pennsylvania, Moravian Closed Village
Near Allentown, Pennsylvania
The borough of Emmaus in Lehigh County was born as a deliberate experiment in communal faith. In seventeen forty-one, two Pennsylvania landowners donated their acreage to the Moravian Church for the purpose of creating a closed village where residents would live entirely according to Moravian customs. By seventeen fifty-nine the community was formally organized, making it one of four major Moravian settlements in colonial America, alongside Bethlehem, Lititz, and Nazareth.
The founders chose the biblical name Emmaus, the village in the New Testament where disciples recognized Jesus after the Resurrection. Outsiders were not welcome to settle here; the Moravians controlled every aspect of life within the community. That closed-off world gradually opened after the American Revolution, and Emmaus was incorporated as a regular Pennsylvania borough in eighteen fifty-nine, exactly a century after its founding.
