North Carolina’s Bethabara is the site of the earliest Moravian settlement in the state. Bethabara, which means “house of passage” in Moravian, was founded on November 17, 1753, by 15 Moravian men who had traveled down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania. It is located just north of present-day Winston-Salem.
As far as the Moravians were concerned, Bethabara was little more than a small abandoned cabin nestled in the northwest corner of Wachovia, a 99,000-acre stretch of land they had purchased.
Each of the original immigrants have a unique skill that was required in order to establish a settlement in the backcountry wilderness. With the help of other church members from Pennsylvania, they were able to create an entire town of log and stone structures, which included a church, a tannery, and a mill.
English, Scotch-Irish, and other German non-Moravian people arrived to Bethabara to trade with the Moravians from near and far. As a result of its location along the Great Wagon Road and the large number of craftsmen that made up the settlement, Bethabara emerged as a significant economic center on the North Carolina frontier during the nineteenth century.
Immediately following the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1754, refugees from the outlying settlement regions began to arrive to Bethabara in search of shelter and security. By July 1756, the war was going so badly for the colonists that the Moravians decided to fortify the Bethabara settlement with a stockade of their own.
Because of the Indian invasions getting closer to Bethabara, the number of refugees swelled and eventually outstripped the Moravian population. In April 1758 another stockade was built around the mill to protect it and the approximately 200 refugees gathered there. It wasn’t until 1761, when the conflict began to wind down, that the refugees were able to leave and life in Bethabara returned to normal.
Following the war, Bethabara’s population continued to expand. During the summer of 1765, the community received orders from church authorities to commence construction on a new town of Salem, which would be located more centrally inside the Wachovia tract.
Perhaps the most significant event in the history of the bustling Bethabara community occurred in June 1771, when Governor William Tryon stationed his troops nearby following his victory over the Regulators at the Battle of Alamance, bringing the village’s history to a close. Within a few months, all of Bethabara’s major industries and craft operations, as well as the majority of its inhabitants, were relocated to Salem.
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