Old Salem on Foot

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.

Salem was designed from the start as a Moravian congregation town — every building with a purpose, every purpose accountable to the community. On the southwest corner of South Main and Academy Streets, the Single Brothers' House makes that logic visible in wood and brick. The first section went up in 1769, built by master mason Melchior Rasp in traditional Germanic half-timber framing — exposed brick noggin, clay tile roof, pent eave. The carpentry was done by Christian Triebel. In 1786, Rasp's successor Johann Gottlob Krause extended the building south in brick. Two construction campaigns, two materials, one continuous idea: house the unmarried men of the congregation, teach them trades, keep the work inside the community. The building held craftsmen and their apprentices, with individual trade shops, a kitchen and dining room, administrative offices, and a Saal — a worship and meeting space — all under one roof. Behind it, a workshop built in 1771 provided additional space; a brewery, slaughterhouse, distillery, and tannery occupied the larger parcel. The gardens have been partially restored. The Single Brothers' House closed in 1823. The older half became apartments, the brick addition a Boys' School for six years, then the building drifted into primarily residential use — known eventually as the Widow's House, occupied mostly by single women and widows of the congregation. The Single Sisters later took control. It was restored in 1964 and remains the property of the Salem Congregation. The building holds National Historic Landmark status, individually designated in 1970. Today it operates as a tour building within Old Salem Museums & Gardens, where working craftspeople still practice Moravian trades on site. During Advent, the Women's Fellowship of Home Moravian Church holds the Candle Tea here — a fundraiser, still running, for local nonprofits. The continuity is not incidental. It's the whole point.

Before dawn, someone arrives to feed the oven. That oven has been eating wood since 1799, when the Moravian Church built this bakery on South Main Street in Old Salem — a living quarter for the baker above, a hearth below. The Church ran it that way until 1807, when a Swiss-born baker named Christian Winkler bought it from them, replaced the original baker Thomas Butner Jr., and made it his own. Winkler, his wife Elizabeth, and their six children lived and worked here for the rest of their lives. His descendants kept it in the family through 1926 — a span that included his grandson Charles and Charles's wife Alice, who added a front porch and second-floor balcony, and then Alice's daughter Bessie and son-in-law Robert Spaugh, who ran it until the end. After that, the building drifted — a tea room, a coffee house, apartments upstairs, an antiques store, a knitting shop, a sewing shop. The kind of slow dispersal that swallows most old buildings whole. Old Salem Museum and Gardens acquired it in 1963 and restored it to its original appearance in 1968. The building itself was constructed by Salem's master builder and mason Johann Gottlob Krause, shortly before his death. Uncut stone on the first story, hand-made brick above. The oven is the point. Workers arrive before dawn, start the wood fire, and by around 7:30 am the fire fades and the bricks hold the heat — around 700°F at peak, then left to fall to around 400°F before baking begins. Wikipedia calls it the oldest continually operating bakery in North Carolina. The most popular thing that comes out of it is Moravian sugar cake. That's the oldest bread in Winston-Salem. It's still warm.

Built in 1784 on the foundations of a frame tavern that burned that same year, the Salem Tavern was the first entirely brick building in what is now Old Salem — and, according to Wikipedia, one of the oldest surviving brick tavern buildings in the United States. The Moravian community that built Salem positioned the tavern on the southern edge of town, where it served as the primary point of contact between the congregation and the outside world. It was where travelers lodged. Everyone else lived by different rules. George Washington slept here during his Southern Tour in 1791 — two nights, by the record. That visit alone would have earned the building its National Historic Landmark designation. But the tavern's place in the city's story runs deeper than a presidential stopover. Salem was the commercial and civic heart of what would eventually become Winston-Salem, a city that grew by merger and reinvention, absorbing its Moravian origins into something larger and louder. The tavern outlasted all of it. Restored to its 1784 appearance — the brick building and the wood-frame annex added in 1815 both intact — it stood for decades as a museum building inside Old Salem Museums & Gardens. Then, in fall 2025, it reopened as a working restaurant: period-dressed staff, a menu that draws from Moravian and soul food traditions. History made edible, which is either the best version of this idea or the worst, depending on your tolerance for living history. The walls have earned their stories. The food is new. Go find out which one carries more weight.

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.

The Moravians called it *Gottesacker* — God's Field — and the name tells you everything about how they understood death. Not a memorial, not a monument park. A field. Something planted, something waiting. Salem's God's Acre sits within the Old Salem district of Winston-Salem, established in 1771, and it operates on a logic that cuts against almost every convention of American burial. There are no family plots. No towering stones for the wealthy, no modest markers for the poor. Every grave gets the same recumbent white marble stone, the same dimensions. The theology is literal: in God's sight, the dead are equal, and the ground makes the argument plainly. The arrangement follows the choir system — not music, but the Moravian practice of dividing a congregation by age, sex, and marital status for mutual spiritual care. In life, the married men sat together at worship; the single women sat together; the children by age. In death, they stay that way. Buried chronologically within each choir section, in the order they were called home. The graveyard is not a family tree. It is a congregation, still assembled. Salem Congregation — thirteen Moravian churches across Winston-Salem — still uses the ground and still buries according to the choir system. Every year on the Saturday before Easter, congregation members place flowers on the graves until the whole field turns to something close to a garden. Then Easter morning arrives, and the congregation walks here for the Sunrise Service: the Church Militant moving among the graves of the Church Triumphant, affirming a resurrection they intend to take seriously. The tradition behind that service traces back to Herrnhut, Saxony, the Moravian mother congregation, long before Salem existed. Come before Easter if you can. The flowers will be out, and the argument the stones make — stubborn, quiet, still unrefuted after two and a half centuries — will be easier to hear.

On May 21, 1865, a Union chaplain — Rev. Seth G. Clark of the 10th Regiment, Ohio Cavalry — stood at the pulpit of a Black Moravian church in Old Salem and read General Orders 32 aloud. Freedom, announced here, in this building, to the congregation that had built it. That congregation organized in 1822, after white Moravians stopped welcoming Black worshippers into their services around 1820. The following year, they built their own log church south of the Strangers Graveyard — the cemetery that had served Salem's African American dead since 1816. Between 1827 and 1831, white Single Sisters taught a Sunday school here, until a state law ended the teaching of literacy to enslaved people. The congregation kept going anyway. The brick church that stands today went up in 1861 — the oldest surviving African American church building in North Carolina. In 1890 it was enlarged with a central hall, classrooms on the lower level, and a large room above that could open onto the sanctuary. The congregation worshipped here under the blunt institutional label "Negro congregation" until December 1913, when Bishop Edward Rondthaler gave it a name at a lovefeast service: St. Philips. The 1823 log church was reconstructed on its original site in 1999. The entire complex is part of Old Salem, and the grounds were restored by Old Salem Museums and Gardens in 2004 for interpretive use. St. Philips is the only historically Black Moravian congregation in the United States. The brick church was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. Worship services are still held here. Salem was a Moravian settlement built on the idea that only church members could live within its boundaries — a controlled, hierarchical community that owned its own property and governed its own life. St. Philips is what happened when that community decided some of its members didn't count. The congregation counted anyway, and built something that outlasted the people who excluded them.

The oldest female educational institution still operating as a women's college in the United States sits inside a historic Moravian district, which tells you something about what kind of place this is. Salem College traces its founding to April 22, 1772, when the Moravian community established a girls' school in Salem, North Carolina. Elisabeth Oesterlein, who had traveled from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was its first teacher. The school was run in its early years by the Single Sisters — the unmarried women of the Moravian community — who lived together and were economically self-sufficient, which was uncommon for women in the eighteenth century. The institution opened to non-Moravians in 1804. Salem College is the 13th-oldest college in the nation and the first founded for women. That connection to the Moravian community has held for more than 250 years. The record of who actually attended tells you what kind of institution this was willing to be. Moravian records show that two enslaved African-American girls were accepted at Salem in the late eighteenth century. In 1826, Sally Ridge, daughter of Cherokee leader Major Ridge, became the first American Indian student. Jane Ross, daughter of another Cherokee chief, also attended — and left Salem in 1838 to join her family on the Trail of Tears. The oldest building on campus is the Single Sisters' House, originally constructed in 1785, and the oldest building in the United States dedicated to the education of women. It shares the campus with Salem Academy, which carries a North Carolina state historic marker. Salem College has since announced a focus on health leadership, positioning itself as the only college dedicated to elevating women in that field. The campus remains inside Old Salem Historic District. That continuity — from a single room in a Moravian settlement to an operating college — is the reason to go.