Friedensstadt — The Moravian City of Peace on the Ohio Frontier

A stone marker on the Pennsylvania-Ohio border commemorates Languntoutenunk, the Delaware word for the Moravian mission town also known as Friedensstadt, which means City of Peace. Delaware Christians who had lived at the Wyalusing mission on the Susquehanna traveled hundreds of miles west, settling here in seventeen seventy-two after stops along the Allegheny River.

Friedensstadt was one of several peaceful Delaware communities sustained by the Moravian Brethren along the Pennsylvania-Ohio corridor during the Revolutionary War, when frontier violence made neutrality nearly impossible to hold. The community eventually relocated to the Tuscarawas Valley in Ohio, where sister missions at Gnadenhutten and Schoenbrunn were established. In March seventeen eighty-two, American militia massacred ninety-six Moravian Delaware at Gnadenhutten, one of the worst atrocities of the Revolutionary frontier and the event that effectively ended Moravian mission work in the Ohio Country.