A bronze relief plaque posted on one of the Hotel Bethlehem’s exterior walls depicts a log cabin, the Moravian settlers’ first quarters at the site. My day-long tour, guided by Keith Sten, HBMS’s museum sites and education manager, begins at the plaque. Sten is dressed in earth-tone docent garb: a wool cape, broad-brimmed hat, waistcoat, and breeches.
He points out recurring architectural details—flared eaves, shallow eyebrow arches—throughout the district’s masonry, clapboard, and log structures. Plaques and labels around the properties contain reproductions of the original drawings, maps, and aerial views, which the Moravians meticulously preserved. Within a few years of their arrival, they created a compound with dozens of workshops, now known as the Colonial Industrial Quarter. The communal economy, supported by the work of a number of enslaved people, boomed as tradespeople turned cowhides by the thousands into shoes, wove silks and velvets, and made ceramic tiles for roofs and stoves.
Men and women at first lived and labored separately, sleeping in communal quarters that were segregated by sex. Marriages had to be approved by the church elders, and couples could reserve rooms for private time. The campus, where at one point about 15 languages were spoken, grew to thousands of acres, with farmsteads, stores, and multipurpose buildings. The creekfront waterworks contains a reconstruction of the machinery that powered America’s first municipal pumped-water system.
