PARKS & RECREATION
Key Assets: Winston-Salem, Forsyth County’s seat, is genuinely and famously home to OLD SALEM, one of the best-preserved and most historically significant Moravian settlements anywhere in the United States; the story begins in 1753, when a devout Protestant fellowship known as the Moravians – followers of 15th-century Bohemian reformer Jan Hus, and recognized by many historians as the first Protestants, predating even the Lutherans by roughly a century – purchased nearly 99,000 acres of Piedmont North Carolina land from Lord John Carteret, naming the tract “die Wachau” (Latinized as “Wachovia”) after an ancestral family estate in Austria; on November 17, 1753, fifteen Moravian Brethren who had walked all the way from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania arrived to establish Bethabara, the first Moravian settlement in North Carolina and the initial center of Moravian religious, governmental, and commercial life in the South; after years of careful planning, the Moravians founded a permanent central town in 1766, naming it Salem – drawn from the Hebrew word “Shalom,” meaning “peace”; Salem was an extraordinarily meticulously planned community, its broad main street, narrower side lanes, and central square all carefully laid out to serve both practical needs and deep religious purpose, with virtually every aspect of commercial and communal life – from opening a bakery to securing a business license – requiring church approval; the town quickly became the administrative, commercial, and craft center of the entire Wachovia tract, renowned for skilled trades including furniture-making, ironwork, tannery, and pottery; among Salem’s most remarkable institutions was the Single Sisters House, established in 1766 when sixteen unmarried young Moravian women formed their own communal household – over the following decades it grew into a 16,000-square-foot home where women, at a time when female education was rare, taught one another mathematics, science, geography, music, and drawing, making it one of the earliest and most significant institutions of women’s education anywhere in the United States; by the 1820s, the Moravian church had also begun offering religious instruction to enslaved people held in Salem, eventually leading to the founding of St. Philips Moravian Church, today recognized as the oldest standing African American church building in North Carolina; in 1849, the Moravian Church sold land just north of Salem, giving rise to the neighboring town of Winston, and the two towns officially merged into modern Winston-Salem in 1913; today, Old Salem Museums & Gardens preserves this remarkable colonial heritage as a National Historic Landmark District, where roughly 70% of the historic buildings are genuinely original 18th- and 19th-century structures, brought to life through costumed interpreters and living-history demonstrations
Notes: Old Salem’s genuine, extensively documented status as one of America’s best-preserved Moravian settlements – home to the country’s earliest institutions of women’s education and significant African American religious history – is one of the most historically rich colonial sites found anywhere in this project.
