Sisters' House
Bethlehem, Northampton County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Built in 1744. Brothers' House until 1748. Here unmarried sisters plied many of the arts and crafts for women. In 1778, Pulaski's banner was made by them.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Built in 1744 and first used as a Brothers' House, this Bethlehem building soon became home to the Moravian community's unmarried women, who lived and worked here practicing the arts and crafts assigned to the sisterhood. In 1778, during the Revolutionary War, the sisters stitched the banner carried by Casimir Pulaski's cavalry legion—a piece of needlework later immortalized in American memory. The Single Sisters' choir was a distinctive feature of Moravian communal life, giving women a defined economic and spiritual role.
Why it matters
The house preserves the story of colonial women's skilled labor and connects that work directly to the Revolutionary cause through the famous Pulaski banner.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This building went up in 1744, in the earliest years of Moravian Bethlehem, when the settlement was still finding its shape on the Pennsylvania frontier. Its very history reflects the community's distinctive way of organizing life: it began as a Brothers' House, home to the community's unmarried men, before becoming, from 1748 onward, the house of the unmarried sisters.
That arrangement was central to Moravian society. The community was structured into groups called choirs—not only for singing, but as living units that gathered people by age, sex, and marital status. The Single Sisters formed one such choir, living and working together with a defined place in the town's spiritual and economic life.
All of this unfolded in the colonial era and carried on into the years of the Revolution. While the wider colonies moved toward war and independence, the sisters of Bethlehem maintained the crafts, discipline, and devotion that defined their community.
People & events
Within these walls, the unmarried sisters practiced many of the arts and crafts assigned to the women of the community. This was skilled, organized labor—needlework and fine handwork among it—that gave the sisters a genuine economic role alongside their spiritual one, an unusual degree of standing for women in the eighteenth century.
The house's most famous moment came in 1778, in the midst of the Revolutionary War, when the sisters made the banner associated with Casimir Pulaski—the Polish-born cavalry officer who had joined the American cause and become one of its notable foreign volunteers. The banner they stitched here is the thread that ties this quiet house of women's work directly to the war for independence.
That piece of needlework passed into American memory in a way few such objects do, remembered long afterward as an emblem of the sisters' craft and of the Revolutionary cause it served. It remains the enduring link between the daily labor of the Single Sisters and the larger drama of the age.
Its place in the American story
The Sisters' House preserves a part of the Revolutionary story that is easy to overlook: the skilled work of women. In an era when women's labor rarely earned public recognition, the Moravian sisters occupied a clearly defined economic and spiritual role, and their handwork was valued craft rather than invisible chore.
The Pulaski banner draws that hidden history into the open. Here is a direct, tangible connection between women's needlework and the armies fighting for American independence—a reminder that the Revolution was sustained not only by soldiers and statesmen but by the hands that made the things they carried.
Seen this way, the house speaks to two national threads at once: the long, often-unwritten history of women's skilled work, and the wide net of people—immigrants, volunteers, and communities of faith among them—who contributed to the founding struggle in ways large and small.
If you visit
The Sisters' House sits among the early stone buildings of Bethlehem's historic Moravian district, and its age shows in the best way—this is one of the settlement's founding-era structures, standing where it has stood since 1744. Take a moment to consider that the walls in front of you were raised before the Revolution was even imagined.
As you look, hold two images together: a house full of women at their crafts, and the 1778 banner that connects their work to the war. That pairing is what makes the site memorable—it turns an ordinary-looking building into a place where women's labor and national history meet.
It fits neatly into a walking tour of old Bethlehem, alongside the district's other early Moravian buildings. Go on foot and take your time; these closely set stone houses tell their story best when you move among them slowly, letting the scale of the founders' planned community sink in.
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
- · Casimir Pulaski
Related events
- · American Revolution
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Pulaski's Banner
Bethlehem, PA · est. 1974
While the Polish cavalry officer Casimir Pulaski guarded this area in 1778, the Moravian women of Bethlehem stitched a crimson banner for his legion, which his horsemen carried until he fell at the Siege of Savannah in 1779. The gift became one of the Revolution's cherished legends, later immortalized in Longfellow's verse "Hymn of the Moravian Nuns." The story bound a foreign volunteer's sacrifice to the quiet devotion of a Pennsylvania religious community.
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.
Brethren's House
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The Moravians who founded Bethlehem built this stone house in 1748 to lodge their unmarried men, and it quickly became a hive of colonial-era craft — a bell foundry, silkworm raising, and other trades that made the community largely self-sufficient. During the Revolution it sheltered wounded Continental soldiers as a military hospital, and after 1815 it opened as a girls' school before becoming part of Moravian College and a museum.
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
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The poet Hilda Doolittle — known to the literary world simply as H.D. — was born in Bethlehem in 1886 and grew into one of the pioneering voices of the Imagist movement. Reaching back to ancient Greece for her spare, luminous style, she pursued what her marker calls the Hellenic spirit and a classic beauty of expression across a career that spanned continents. She died in Zurich in 1961 and rests in nearby Nisky Hill Cemetery.