Whitefield House
Nazareth, Northampton County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Begun in 1740 at request of Methodist missionary, Reverend George Whitefield, as a school for Negroes. Completed by the Moravians in 1743. Served as a communal church-home for 32 newly married German couples brought over in 1744.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
The house links the Great Awakening's most celebrated preacher, early efforts at African American education, and the Moravian communal experiment in a single colonial building.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Whitefield House rose in a decade when the American colonies were caught up in a wave of religious excitement now remembered as the Great Awakening. Traveling preachers drew enormous crowds, revival swept from town to town, and questions of faith, conscience, and salvation were suddenly at the center of public life. Eastern Pennsylvania, with its patchwork of denominations and its reputation for tolerance, was fertile ground for it all.
This was also a frontier still being settled, and the German-speaking Moravians were among the most energetic community-builders in the region. They combined deep piety with remarkable practical skill, putting up sturdy stone buildings meant to serve the whole community rather than a single family.
Into that setting came an idea unusually bold for its time: a school specifically for Black children. That such a project was even begun in the 1740s tells you something about the reforming, evangelical spirit of the moment — and about how the currents of the Great Awakening pushed at least some of its leaders toward the education of people the wider colonial world was working to keep enslaved and unlettered.
People & events
The building takes its name from the Reverend George Whitefield, the most celebrated revivalist preacher of the age — a voice so powerful that crowds gathered by the thousands to hear him in the open air. It was at his urging that work on the house began in 1740, with the intention that it serve as a school for Black children.
Whitefield's plan, however, did not come to fruition, and it was the Moravians who carried the building through to completion in 1743. In their hands it became something else: a communal structure serving the tight-knit religious settlement around it. Its most memorable early use came in 1744, when it sheltered thirty-two newly married German couples who had been brought across the ocean, housing them together as a kind of shared church-home.
That is a genuinely unusual scene to picture — dozens of young married couples living communally under one roof, their private lives folded into the collective life of the community. It captures how differently the Moravians organized the world, and how a single sturdy building could pass, within just a few years, from one grand purpose to another.
Its place in the American story
Few colonial buildings gather so many threads of American history under one roof. Here the Great Awakening's most famous preacher, an early attempt at African American education, and the Moravians' communal way of life all intersect in a single stone house — and that convergence is exactly what makes the place matter beyond its own town.
The origins of the building are a reminder that the impulse to educate Black Americans reaches back much further than many people assume, into the colonial era itself, and that it was often bound up with religious conviction. That the school as first envisioned did not take hold is part of the story too, a mark of how much resistance and difficulty such efforts faced.
Its later life as a communal home speaks to another distinctly American theme: the many experiments in shared, faith-centered living that dissenting groups pursued once they reached these shores. Taken together, the house is a compact lesson in how tangled and surprising early American history really is — revival, race, immigration, and community all pressed into the same walls.
If you visit
Stand back and take in the sheer solidity of the place first. This is early Moravian stone construction built to last, and it has — the same walls that sheltered a community in the 1740s are still doing their work. That endurance is part of what you're coming to see.
Then let the layers of the story sink in. Try to hold all of them at once: the revival preacher whose idea set the building in motion, the school for Black children that was intended here, the Moravian builders who finished it, and the thirty-two young couples who once made it a shared home. Few buildings ask you to imagine so many different lives passing through so quickly.
The house sits in the historic heart of Nazareth, so it fits neatly into a day spent exploring the region's early Moravian sites. Move between them and you'll start to see the whole settlement as its founders did — a community where faith, work, and daily life were all built out of the same enduring stone.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · George Whitefield
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Whitefield House - PLAQUE
Nazareth, PA · est. 1931
The Whitefield House traces its origins to 1740, when the famed revivalist George Whitefield acquired land in the Pennsylvania backcountry with the intention of founding a school for Black children. Moravian Brethren began the sturdy stone building, and after the Moravians purchased the tract in 1741 it served in turn as a family dwelling, a girls' boarding school, and a nursery for missionaries' children. Since the 19th century it has housed the Moravian Historical Society and Museum, preserving the memory of these early ventures.
Moravian Archives
Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953
First organized in 1757, the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem safeguards the records of one of America's oldest Protestant communities. Its shelves hold manuscripts, books, music, and images tracing Moravian life in North America from 1740 to the present — including the meticulous diaries the church kept of its congregations and frontier missions. It is a rare, continuous documentary window onto colonial faith, culture, and daily life.
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.
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.