“And Will You There a City Build”: The Moravian Congregation Town and the Creation of Salem, North Carolina

When the first Moravian settlers arrived in North Carolina and founded the town of Salem in the middle of the eighteenth century, Moravians had built many types of settlements across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. These included household missions, farming villages, and the most complex, the Gemein Ort, or congregation town, although before 1750 congregation towns stood only in Europe and the British colony of Pennsylvania. Individuals, both leaders and residents, play vital roles in the development and function of any town, but social systems and ideological beliefs also shape and define a community.¹ The Moravians built congregation towns to create a kind of functional segregation. They wanted to maintain their religious and cultural traditions by building insular settlements, but they were craftsmen, and as their towns were primarily places of production and trade, not agriculture, they needed customers.² Balancing these two disparate goals was difficult.³ Incorporating their religious and social systems into the congregation town form, the Moravians of Salem created a mechanism that allowed them to maintain the unique character of their community for almost a century.⁴

Moravian congregation towns shared common elements, such as types of buildings and the basic town form, that could be replicated in multiple settings. These eighteenth-century German Pietists organized their social systems physically using common rectilinear streetscapes with larger public buildings set around a central square, just as they used familiar German architectural design elements and construction techniques, adapting them to meet their needs.⁵ The public buildings were quite substantial structures, and the Moravians constructed them to serve specific functions, but only after a lengthy process of discussion, planning, and prayer. Within a Gemein Ort, the locations for houses, which usually fronted streets, were carefully thought out, allowing for ample space for a work yard and garden or orchard behind the house (Figure 1). The center of the community was the town square, which could serve a variety of purposes: market, park, meeting place, or in some instances, even farmland. The Gemein Haus, a multipurpose building housing religious and government activities, usually dominated the square and thus the town (Figure 2). Each new congregation town constructed in the first half of the eighteenth century contributed some original element to Moravian town design that helped shape the North Carolina project. Thus, the evolution of the congregation town form and the creation of Moravian religious and social systems are key to understanding the decisions the Brethren made for Salem.

The Emergence of the Congregation Town

When Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf agreed to help find a safe haven for Protestants living in Moravia in the first decades of the eighteenth century, establishing a town on his ancestral estate in Saxony was far from his mind. Zinzendorf was involved in the Pietist movement then flourishing in the German states when Christian David, a charismatic Lutheran minister from Moravia, brought the plight of the refugees to his attention. In 1719 David had met five brothers who traced their ancestry to the pre-Reformation church, the Unitas Fratrum (Unity of the Brethren), which had been all but destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War.⁶ The count agreed to help, and David began leading refugees to Zinzendorf’s estate.⁷ On June 17, 1722, they began to build the first structure of what grew to become the first Moravian congregation town, Herrnhut (Lord’s Watch).⁸

Figure 1.

Micksch House Garden, Old Salem Museums & Gardens, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Photograph by the author, 2012.

The refugees were not all members of the Unity but represented a variety of religious groups. Initially, Zinzendorf wanted the refugees to join the Lutheran Church, but he slowly modified his view and aided in the renewal of the ancient Unity.⁹ He continued to resist the notion of the Moravians maintaining a separate religious identity, but in 1731 Zinzendorf finally stopped trying to force complete assimilation after consulting God through the use of the Lot.¹⁰

The Lot, an important religious custom and social...