Whitefield House - PLAQUE
Nazareth, Northampton County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Whitfield House, planned by George Whitfield in 1740 when he obtained 5,000 acres of land for a Negro school and begun by Peter Boehler and several Brethern. Purchased by the Moravians 1741. Completed for a family house 1743. Converted into a boarding school for girls 1745 and into a nursery for children of missionaries three years later. Used as a home for retired mission workers since 1764, except for the year 1855-1858, when it was occupied by the Theological Seminary, seat of the Moravian Historical Society and Museum since 1871.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
The house links the Great Awakening, early efforts at educating Black and female students, and the Moravian missionary world into a single colonial-era structure that still stands as a museum.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Pennsylvania backcountry of 1740 was a frontier of possibility and hard labor, a place where religious visionaries came to build the communities they could not build in the crowded, established colonies. Land was plentiful, oversight was thin, and an idea could be planted on five thousand acres and left to grow.
This was also the era of the Great Awakening, a wave of fervent religious revival sweeping the colonies. Traveling preachers drew enormous crowds, and no one drew larger ones than George Whitefield, the English evangelist whose voice could reach thousands in the open air. Men like Whitefield thought big, and they thought about more than sermons — they thought about schools, settlements, and the shape of a Christian society in the New World.
Into this landscape came the Moravians, the same disciplined, mission-minded community that built solidly wherever it settled. When plans changed hands, as they did here, the Moravians brought their gift for turning ambition into stone and mortar — and for putting a building to one purpose after another as the needs of a growing community shifted.
People & events
The story begins with George Whitefield, who in 1740 acquired a large tract of land in this backcountry with a striking intention: to found a school for Black children. In an age when such an idea was rare, that plan is worth pausing over. Peter Boehler and several of the Brethren began raising a sturdy stone house to serve it.
But the vision and the reality parted ways. Within a year the Moravians had purchased the tract, and the school Whitefield imagined was not established here. The building he had begun found other lives instead — first completed as a family dwelling, then, remarkably early, converted into a boarding school for girls, and soon after into a nursery for the children of missionaries sent far from home.
From there its usefulness only continued. It became a residence for retired mission workers, briefly housed a theological seminary in the mid-19th century, and at last became the seat of a historical society and museum. Few buildings pass through so many hands and purposes; fewer still survive to tell about it.
Its place in the American story
This one stone house touches several of the largest currents in early American life. It was conceived in the heat of the Great Awakening, the religious movement that did more than any single event to knit the far-flung colonies into a shared emotional and moral experience before there was a nation to share it.
It also gestures — however imperfectly — toward two ideas well ahead of their time: education for Black children, envisioned in its founding purpose, and formal education for girls, realized within a few years of its completion. That a colonial building carried both intentions in its early history says something about how radical some of these religious communities were willing to be.
And it embodies the Moravian missionary world, a network that sent workers across great distances and needed places to raise their children and shelter them in old age. To stand before this house is to see, in a single structure, the reach of a faith community that thought in terms of the whole world.
If you visit
What strikes most visitors first is simply how solid the place is. This was built to last, and it has — a plain, strong stone house that has outlived nearly every purpose it was ever put to. Let your eye rest on the masonry and the proportions; this is the frontier architecture of people who built for permanence.
Because the house now serves as the seat of a historical society and museum, it invites you to go beyond the exterior and into the layered story within. As you move through it, try holding all its lives in mind at once — family home, girls' school, nursery, retirement house, seminary. Same walls, one after another.
It makes a rewarding stop on any tour of the region's early religious heritage, and it pairs well with the other Moravian sites nearby. Come curious rather than rushed. This is a building whose meaning is cumulative, built up over generations, and it gives the most to a visitor willing to imagine each chapter in turn.
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
- · George Whitefield
- · Peter Boehler
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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.
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.
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Catherine Drinker Bowen grew up in this Bethlehem home while her father served as a university president in the early twentieth century, absorbing a world of ideas that shaped her career. She became one of America's most admired biographers and historians, bringing figures like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Sir Edward Coke vividly to life, and celebrating the drama of the Constitutional Convention in "Miracle at Philadelphia." Her narrative gift made scholarly history accessible to a wide reading public.
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Around 1900, the African-American evangelist Harriet A. Baker opened a mission on North Penn Street in Allentown and preached there until her death. Her small storefront ministry took root, and in 1914 it became the first home of St. James A.M.E. Zion Church, which built its permanent home on this spot in 1936. Baker was part of a wider tradition of Black women preachers who founded and sustained congregations at a time when the pulpit was rarely open to them.