First House of Moravian Settlement - PLAQUE
Bethlehem, Northampton County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
The first house of the Moravian settlement occupied March 9, 1741, stood on this site. In this house on Christmas Eve 1741 COUNT ZINZENDORF, conducting a love feast, named the place Bethlehem.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In 1741 a small band of Moravians — Protestant refugees from Central Europe — built their first house on this ground and set to work founding a mission community. On Christmas Eve that year, Count Zinzendorf, their patron and leader, held a love feast in the house and named the settlement Bethlehem for the town of Christ's birth. From this single dwelling grew one of colonial America's most important religious and cultural centers.
Why it matters
Bethlehem's Moravian founders shaped colonial Pennsylvania's tradition of religious refuge and communal enterprise, and their naming here endures on the American map.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early 1700s, Pennsylvania had a reputation unusual for its time: a colony where people could worship as they pleased. William Penn's promise of religious liberty drew waves of dissenters, pietists, and small sects from the German-speaking lands of Central Europe, many of whom had known persecution at home. They arrived looking for room to build the kind of community their faith demanded.
The Moravians were among these newcomers. They traced their spiritual roots to an old Protestant movement that predated even the Reformation, and by the 1730s they had reorganized into a disciplined, mission-minded church. When they crossed the Atlantic, they did not scatter as isolated families. They came to plant an ordered, communal settlement — a place designed from the first house outward.
The land along the Lehigh River in eastern Pennsylvania suited that vision. It was fertile, watered, and open to the mixed frontier of settlers and Native peoples the Moravians hoped to reach. Onto this ground, on a March day in 1741, they raised their first dwelling and began, quite literally, to build a town from nothing.
People & events
The story here turns on a single winter night. The Moravians' first house on this site had barely been finished — occupied that spring — when their patron arrived to spend Christmas among them. He was a nobleman who had given the movement his lands, his fortune, and his leadership, and his presence turned a rough frontier dwelling into the heart of a new community.
On Christmas Eve, gathered in that house, the settlers held a love feast — a simple shared meal of song and fellowship that is one of the tenderest Moravian traditions. In the warmth of that gathering, Count Zinzendorf gave the place its name. He called it Bethlehem, after the town where Christ was born, binding the little settlement forever to the Christmas story being sung around him.
It is easy to picture the scene: a handful of people, far from the countries of their birth, marking the holiest night of their year in a house so new the timber was barely seasoned. From that room, a name was spoken that would outlast every person in it.
Its place in the American story
Bethlehem became far more than a mission outpost. The Moravians made it a model of communal enterprise — organized trades, shared labor, schools, and one of colonial America's richest musical and craft traditions. Their industry and their learning gave the young town an influence out of all proportion to its size.
It also embodied something central to the American experiment: the idea that a community could be founded on faith and welcomed rather than hunted. The Moravians were exactly the kind of people Penn's colony was built to receive — refugees turning exile into enterprise — and their success helped prove that religious refuge could be a foundation for real, lasting settlement.
And there is the name itself. Across the American map, hundreds of towns carry names lifted from scripture and from the settlers' hopes. Few can point to the precise house, the precise night, and the precise voice that first spoke the name aloud. This site can.
If you visit
You are standing at the seed of a city — the spot where the very first house of Bethlehem stood. Take a moment to notice how ordinary the ground is, and then how extraordinary what grew from it: a whole town traced back to one dwelling and one Christmas Eve.
The historic Moravian district around you rewards slow walking. Look for the early stone buildings, the workshops and communal structures that carry the sober, sturdy craftsmanship the Moravians were known for. The plaque itself is small, but it anchors everything nearby — read it, then look up and let the surviving old town fill in the rest.
If you can time a visit to the Christmas season, the connection between the name and the night comes fully alive; Bethlehem leans into its heritage then. Any time of year, though, this is a fine first stop before wandering the older streets — a place to begin the story rather than end it.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Count Zinzendorf
Related events
- · Founding of Bethlehem, 1741
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Moravian Community
Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953
On June 25, 1742, the Moravians formally organized their community at Bethlehem, planting one of colonial America's most distinctive religious settlements along the Lehigh. Their oldest buildings still stand on West Church Street — among them the Gemeinhaus, Sisters' House, Bell House, Brothers' House, and Old Chapel — a remarkable cluster of colonial architecture built by a devout, communal society. Together they map the daily rhythm of a town organized around faith, work, and shared living.
Old Chapel
Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953
In the mid-1700s Bethlehem was a tightly organized Moravian community, and this second place of worship served the congregation from 1751 to 1806. The Moravians were renowned for their sophisticated sacred music, and within these walls prominent leaders of the Revolutionary era heard hymns, chorales, and the Gospel preached by bishops such as Spangenberg and Ettwein. It was a spiritual and cultural center in a settlement that punched far above its size in the young nation's religious and musical life.
Gemeinhaus
Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953
Built in 1741, the Gemeinhaus was the beating heart of the new Moravian settlement at Bethlehem, its second floor serving as the community's first place of worship. In 1742 Count von Zinzendorf, the Moravians' patron and leader, kept his quarters here while directing the church's ambitious missionary work in America. Through the colonial and Revolutionary years its rooms hosted conference after notable conference, making this log building a center of religious and civic life on the Pennsylvania frontier.
Bell House
Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953
Raised in 1745 by Bethlehem's Moravians, this sturdy Germanic building first sheltered the community as a Family House before opening in 1749 as a school for girls — an unusually early commitment to educating young women in colonial America. Its turret carried the town's first clock in 1746 and a bell cast right in Bethlehem that still rings, while a weathervane fashioned as the church seal crowns the roof. The details speak to a close-knit religious settlement that built for permanence and for learning.