Moravian Cemetery
Bethlehem, Northampton County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Used as a burial place, 1742-1910. Site selected and consecrated by Count von Zinzendorf. Only flat gravestones were permitted. Here are the graves of persons of various nationalities and races.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Consecrated by Count von Zinzendorf, this burial ground served Moravian Bethlehem from 1742 to 1910. In keeping with the community's belief that all are equal in death, only flat gravestones were permitted, laid in orderly rows without grand monuments. Here rest people of many nationalities and races — European settlers alongside Native American and African converts — a quiet testament to the Moravians' unusually inclusive spiritual vision.
Why it matters
This "God's Acre" made a radical statement for its time, burying people of every background as equals, and stands as an early American expression of the idea that dignity transcends race and station.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When the Moravians laid out Bethlehem in the 1740s, they were building far more than a village. They were trying to live out a particular vision of Christian community — orderly, communal, and startlingly serious about the idea that all souls stood equal before God.
Colonial America, by contrast, was a deeply stratified place. Rank, wealth, and above all race shaped nearly every corner of life, and death was no exception: grand tombs marked the powerful, while the poor and the enslaved often lay in unmarked ground.
Against that backdrop, the burial ground consecrated here in 1742 was a deliberate statement. Its very design refused the hierarchies that governed the world outside its gates.
People & events
The site was chosen and consecrated by Count von Zinzendorf, the German nobleman who led and financed the Moravian movement and helped bring the community to Pennsylvania. That a count should found a graveyard built on equality is itself part of the story — this was a man who set aside a great deal of worldly rank in the service of his faith.
The rule that only flat gravestones were permitted carried real meaning. No towering monument could announce that one person had mattered more than another; the dead lay in orderly rows, each marker level with its neighbors. In Moravian practice, believers were often buried according to their congregational "choir" — their group by age and station in life — rather than by family wealth.
And the ground held people of many nationalities and races: European settlers alongside Native American and African converts, laid to rest as members of one community. In the America of that era, that was close to radical.
Its place in the American story
This "God's Acre" put a conviction into the soil that much of the country would take generations to even debate: that human dignity does not depend on race, rank, or riches. In a colonial world organized around exactly those distinctions, a graveyard where all lay equal was a quiet act of dissent.
It should be understood honestly rather than idealized. The Moravians were people of their century, and their inclusiveness had limits and contradictions. Yet the physical fact remains — different peoples buried side by side, under identical flat stones — and it stands as one of early America's more remarkable expressions of spiritual equality.
Used for burials from 1742 until 1910, the ground gathered nearly two centuries of that community's life. It is a place where an idea the nation still wrestles with was, for a time, simply lived.
If you visit
Look first at what isn't here: no soaring obelisks, no competing monuments jockeying for attention. Just flat stones set level with the earth, in calm rows. Let that uniformity work on you — it was meant to.
Walk slowly and read the stones as a group rather than one by one. Together they tell you that the people beneath them were understood as equals, and that among them are individuals whose worlds could hardly have been more different in life — brought together in death by a shared faith.
This is a contemplative stop, best taken at an unhurried pace. On a trip through early American history, it offers something rare: not a story of who won or who ruled, but a modest, radical demonstration of how a community chose to treat every one of its own.
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 von Zinzendorf
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Emmaus
Emmaus, PA · est. 1966
Long before European settlers, the Lenape knew this place as "Macungie," the feeding place of the bears. Settlement began in the 1730s, and a sturdy Shelter House went up in 1734 to protect the community. In 1761 Moravians organized a close-knit congregational village here—a "Gemein-Ort"—and gave it the biblical name Emmaus.
Whitefield House
Nazareth, PA · est. 1966
The Whitefield House was begun in 1740 at the urging of the famed revivalist preacher George Whitefield, who envisioned it as a school for Black children. When his plans faltered, the Moravians completed the building in 1743 and put it to communal use—most memorably as a shared home for 32 newly married German couples brought to Pennsylvania in 1744. Its stout walls have watched over Nazareth ever since.
Nazareth
Nazareth, PA · est. 1966
Nazareth was founded in 1740 by Moravian settlers who had abandoned a struggling colony in Georgia and sought a fresh start in Pennsylvania. Under Bishop August Spangenberg they built the "Great Economy," a communal system running from 1745 to 1765 in which labor and goods were pooled. The whole enterprise was designed to sustain Moravian missionaries carrying their faith to Native peoples.
Colonel Jacob Stroud - PLAQUE
Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1931
This graveyard began as the cemetery of the Mission of Dansbury, a Moravian outpost started in 1743 near where Daniel Brodhead had settled in 1736. The mission chapel was destroyed during the Indian uprising of 1755 amid the French and Indian War, then rebuilt. Colonel Jacob Stroud — the frontier officer and founder of Stroudsburg — lies buried here.