Nazareth
Nazareth, Northampton County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Moravian settlers arrived here in 1740 from a failing colony in Georgia. Bishop August B. Spangenberg led an experiment in communal living, called the "Great Economy," 1745-1765. It was designed to support Christian missionaries to the Indians.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Nazareth stands among the most important Moravian settlements in America, a model of communal religious economy and the launching point for a remarkable missionary movement.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1740, the ridge-and-valley country of eastern Pennsylvania was a genuine frontier — heavily wooded, thinly settled, and shared uneasily by Native peoples and a steady stream of European newcomers. Pennsylvania's reputation for religious tolerance made it a magnet for faiths that had found little welcome elsewhere, and among them were the Moravians, members of a devout Protestant church with roots in central Europe and a burning commitment to missionary work.
The settlers who founded Nazareth did not arrive fresh from across the ocean with high hopes. They came north after an attempt to establish a Moravian presence in the colony of Georgia had failed. That earlier disappointment matters: these were people who had already tasted hardship and were looking, quite deliberately, for a place to begin again on firmer ground.
They found it in Northampton County, where they set about carving farms, workshops, and meeting places out of the woods. What they built was not an ordinary land-hungry frontier town but a planned religious community — a settlement organized around faith, discipline, and a shared purpose.
People & events
The central figure named on the marker is Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg, a leader of unusual organizational gifts who guided the Moravians' American work in these early years. Under his direction, Nazareth became the site of a bold social experiment the community called the "Great Economy," which ran from 1745 to 1765.
The idea behind it was as practical as it was spiritual. Rather than each household fending for itself, labor and goods were pooled: members worked the fields, ran the trades, and shared the produce as a single communal enterprise. Everyone's effort supported the whole, and the whole, in turn, supported a purpose larger than any individual family's prosperity.
That purpose was mission. The Great Economy was designed to free up people and resources to carry the Moravian faith to Native communities. In effect, the farmers, smiths, and craftworkers of Nazareth were the support system that made it possible for missionaries to go out — a home base whose disciplined, collective labor underwrote the church's spiritual work on the frontier.
Its place in the American story
Colonial America saw a number of experiments in communal living, but few were as sustained or as clearly organized as the Moravians'. Nazareth stands among the most important Moravian settlements in the country, and its Great Economy is a striking early example of a faith community pooling its economic life in service of a shared mission.
It also belongs to a larger and more complicated American story: the long, fraught history of European missionaries reaching out to Native peoples. The Moravians were unusual in the seriousness with which they engaged Native communities and languages, and Nazareth was one of the springboards for that effort. Any honest telling of it holds together genuine devotion on one side and the deep, often tragic disruptions that colonization brought to Native life on the other.
And because Pennsylvania's tolerance is what let this community take root at all, Nazareth is also a small case study in the colony's founding promise. It shows what could grow when a group with an unpopular past — a failed colony behind them, an unconventional faith in front of them — was simply given room to build.
If you visit
Nazareth rewards visitors who like to read a town as a document. This was a planned religious settlement, so look for the marks of a community that organized itself around shared faith and work rather than around a single crossroads or mill. The early Moravian buildings and street plan still carry that intention.
Give yourself time to think about the Great Economy as you walk. For twenty years the people here lived a genuinely collective life, and standing in the heart of the old settlement is a good way to feel how ambitious — and how demanding — that arrangement must have been. This was communal living not as a slogan but as daily practice.
Because it sits in the historic Moravian country of Northampton County, Nazareth pairs naturally with the region's other early Moravian sites. Together they let you trace a single remarkable movement across the landscape: a people who failed once, started over, and built one of colonial America's most distinctive communities in these Pennsylvania hills.
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
- · August B. Spangenberg
Related events
- · The Great Economy
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Moravian Cemetery
Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953
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.
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.
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.
Nicholas Dupuy (1682-1762) - PLAQUE
Smithfield Township, PA · est. 1930
In 1727 Nicholas Dupuy became the first European settler at Shawnee on the Delaware, buying some 3,000 acres — including river islands — from the Minsi (Munsee) band of the Lenape. He descended from Huguenot refugees who had fled religious persecution in France and reached New Amsterdam in 1662. By mid-century the growing community had land set aside, through proprietor William Allen, for a Dutch Reformed congregation that endures today as a Presbyterian church.