Home Moravian Church

The sanctuary at the northeast corner of Salem Square has stood since 1800, and it faces the way it does for a reason — though that story lives in the Wachovia Historical Society's archives, not in the building's plain brick face.

Salem itself was the thing that made this possible. When the Moravian Church purchased nearly 99,000 acres in 1753 and called it Wachovia, the plan was always for a central town. Salem was that town, laid out around a square, with the congregation meeting house as its anchor. The Salem Congregation was formally organized on November 13, 1771, and the sanctuary the congregation worships in today was consecrated on November 9, 1800 — the plans completed two years before that, in 1798. It has been the worship home ever since.

The name came later. As the congregation's Sunday School programs spread into the surrounding towns of Winston and Salem, this building became what people simply called the home church. It stuck.

What brings thousands here each Easter morning is older than the building itself. The Easter Sunrise Service has been held in Salem since 1772 — the tradition reaching back further still, to Herrnhut, Germany, in 1732. Salem Square and God's Acre Cemetery, the Moravian graveyard nearby, have held that service every Easter since. Some who come are from overseas.

The church is open for Sunday worship and, during much of the year, for informal visits when members speak with anyone who walks in — about Moravian history, about what it means to belong to a congregation this old, on this ground. The pipe organ is there. The stained-glass windows are there. The building has been standing long enough that the weight of the place does the talking.