Old Salem Museums & Gardens

Salem was not rebuilt. That distinction matters. When Old Salem Inc. formed in 1950 to protect what had become a depressed stretch of Winston-Salem, the Moravian settlement founded in 1766 was still substantially there — roughly 70 percent of the buildings in the historic district are original. You don't get that anywhere. You walk on uneven brick and it's genuinely old.

The Moravians who laid this out were methodical people. They purchased just under 99,000 acres in the Carolina Piedmont, named the tract Wachovia, and built Salem as its central economic, religious, and administrative center — a congregation town where the church owned the property and kept meticulous records of everything. Those records became the blueprint for restoration; many of the original documents still sit in the Moravian archives. Salem merged with neighboring Winston in 1913 and receded into the city, but the bones held.

What Old Salem runs now is a living-history museum with real stakes. Interpreters work the trades — tinsmithing, blacksmithing, cobbling, gunsmithing, baking — in buildings where those trades were actually practiced. The Single Brothers' House, completed in 1769, is the largest half-timbered building in the Carolinas, a National Historic Landmark that housed craftsmen and their apprentices, with individual trade shops, a kitchen, a dining room, and a Saal for worship. The Salem Tavern, built in 1784, is where George Washington spent two nights — May 31 and June 1, 1791 — during his Southern Tour.

The harder history is here too. St. Philip's Moravian Church, built in 1861 by the Salem congregation for enslaved and free African Americans, is the oldest surviving African American church built for that purpose in North Carolina. The Emancipation Proclamation was read there in 1865 by the chaplain of the 10th Ohio Regiment.

Go on a weekday. The interpreters are working, not performing.