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.
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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.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
Bethlehem, PA · est. 1997
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.
Harriet A. Baker
Allentown, PA · est. 1990
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.