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Bethania is an extant town in northwestern Forsyth County, North Carolina, and although its antiquity may not be obvious to the casual visitor , there is an aura of age about the place. Older houses are arranged in compact array against stone sidewalks on either side of a central main street. They occupy neat lawns where fences de¤ne lots and where outbuildings of various materials and uses stand; glimpses between them and beyond reveal narrow lanes, pastures, ¤elds, and woodlots. Mature shrubs and trees in yards indicate established age, an impression heightened by a conspicuous old brick church at the center of the residential cluster. A cedar-lined avenue climbs easterly from the church to a cedar-covered hill, ending at a well-maintained graveyard surrounded by a freshly painted white board-rail fence. From this hillside vantage, outlying agricultural¤elds of upland and bottomland increase the sense of compact unity within the residential area, but also suggest an interrelationship between the clustered houses, farmlands, and woodlands. Creeks wind through fertile bottoms and the surrounding ridge tops position the residential area in a tight fold within the broader landscape. This is the impression of Bethania at the close of the twentieth century, a Moravian town established in 1759. Founded on the frontier of North Carolina during a period of Indian warfare, the village today re®ects the needs of its original settlers and their adaptation of an ancient European form. The success of this adaptation is the story of Bethania, the Wachovia Tract, the broader colonial settlement of North Carolina, and the Moravian role in that process. Ancient Form The form of Bethania predates its creation on the frontier of Carolina. Study of Bethania has revealed an arrangement of domestic and agricul8 Bethania: A Colonial Moravian Adaptation Michael O. Hartley tural divisions of land that has antecedents in a time so remote that the origins of the form are unknown. This form, identi¤ed as open-¤eld agriculture , existed in England prior to the time of the Domesday Book as a nucleated village, with typically one street and a set of surrounding ¤elds. It is found in Europe in ancient times as well. Scholars have proposed that elements of this form are seen in the writings of Tacitus on the Germanic tribes, about a.d. 98, in which he described land division with many similarities to the open-¤eld system (Ault 1972:15–16). Bethania is clearly an example of open-¤eld agriculture. It may also be called a landschaft, which “in ancient and medieval thought is the intimate relation of ¤elds and clustered structures,” the safety of the familiar in contrast to the danger of the “wilderness” beyond (Stilgoe 1982:7–12). John Stilgoe has argued that this form of outlying ¤elds surrounding a cluster of houses derived from spatial economics, with the more intensely tended garden plots, orchards, and ¤elds that required daily attention lying closer in, while less intensely tended ¤elds lay beyond. Surrounding these were hay meadows, followed by an outer group of pasture ¤elds. The argument for this form in a nonmechanized society involved the economics of time, the walking time required to reach the workplace (Stilgoe 1982:17). However, in North Carolina, where the common pattern for the farming family was the detached homestead, there were other necessities that led to the selection of this arrangement for Bethania. There was another “economy” involved, that of survival on a hostile frontier, and the need for a form that a corporate theocratic community could adapt to a dangerous land. Present on the Landscape A detailed archaeological examination of Bethania greatly heightens awareness of its age and structure as the meaning of the extant landscape reveals itself (Hartley 1993). The system of the residential area and outlots, linked with a carefully designed pattern of roads and lanes, emerges with clarity through study, as does its connection to the environs and region. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of studies on Bethania were conducted that concentrated on archaeological evidence of land-use patterns, the built environment, and planning issues related to modern development pressure on the community. Inherent in the work was an effort to expand general knowledge and awareness of this historic community . One result of the endeavor was the creation of a ¤ve hundred–acre Bethania National Register Historic District, based largely on the signi¤cance of the historic land-use patterns (Hartley and Boxley 1990). This nomination was an expansion and amendment...

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