Lititz
Lititz, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Settled during 1740s, Moravians established here a "Land Gemeine," or country congregation in 1756. It was named by Count Zinzendorf after a Bohemian town which sheltered persecuted Moravians in 1456.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Settled in the 1740s, Lititz became in 1756 a Moravian "Land Gemeine," a tightly knit country congregation that ordered the town's land, trades, and worship around its church. Count Zinzendorf, the Moravians' great patron, named it for a Bohemian town that had sheltered persecuted brethren back in 1456—binding this Pennsylvania village to centuries of European religious exile. The result was one of America's distinctive planned Moravian communities.
Why it matters
Lititz shows how German-speaking Protestant refugees transplanted a whole communal way of life to Pennsylvania, whose promise of religious tolerance drew such congregations from across Europe.
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Related people
- · Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf
Related events
- · Founding of the Lititz Moravian congregation, 1756
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Moravian Gemeinhaus
Lititz, PA · est. 1953
In 1746 the Moravians—a close-knit German Protestant community—built a Gemeinhaus at Lititz that served at once as church, parsonage, and school. Standing on the rise above Carter's Run, it was the heart of a planned religious settlement where faith, work, and daily life were tightly woven together. The Moravians were among the most disciplined and musically gifted of Pennsylvania's colonial communities.
Baron Stiegel
Manheim, PA · est. 1947
In the mid-1700s, German immigrant Henry William Stiegel — known in his heyday as "Baron" Stiegel — turned a Lancaster County iron furnace into one of colonial America's most ambitious industrial ventures, laying out the town of Manheim in 1762 and opening a celebrated glassworks two years later. His fine flint glass rivaled European imports and made his name, even as his lavish living later ruined him. His famous gift of church land carried a nominal rent of one red rose a year, a token still paid to his heirs.
Isaac Long Barn
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Around 1767, in the barn of a Lancaster County farmer, a revival brought together two very different preachers of Pennsylvania's German-speaking community: Philip William Otterbein of the German Reformed Church and the Mennonite Martin Boehm. Their meeting is remembered as the seedbed of the United Brethren in Christ, later part of the Evangelical United Brethren Church. It was a distinctly Pennsylvania-Dutch moment, when the region's many immigrant faiths began to cross their own boundaries.
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