Salem NC was established by the Moravians in 1766. The Moravians were German speakers who came to the Piedmont of NC from what is now the Czech Republic, via Pennsylvania. Much of the town has been restored to show life in the town from 1766 to the late 1800's.
Here's Norris on the covered bridge that leads visitors from the modern Visitor's Center to the main street of town and Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA).
The museum is visited by guided tours and photography is not allowed. Our guide was extremely
knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the collection of furnishings,
household items, paintings and textiles. They have some very rare
quilts - you can see them at
this link.
The Village sidewalks are brick or stone, and the guides working at the site are dressed in period costume, but the streets themselves are modern. Unlike Colonial Williamsburg, all the houses are not part of the Old Salem Village management: some are private residences. This photo gives a bit of the flavor of the town.
This brick building with the large front porch was the Tavern. President George Washington stayed here on his 1791 tour of the Southern United States.
Young Moravian men were not allowed to marry until they had learned a trade. At 14, they moved from the family home to the Single Brother's House. One of the sisters played the town's original pipe organ just for us in the prayer/meeting room on the first level. We then we visited a carpenter, a potter and a shoemaker, in the spaces that were used by the original master craftsmen who trained the young men.
Down in the basement level of the Single Brother's House we spent time with these Sisters who had set up an extensive demonstration of dying with plant matter. You can see some of the variety of colors they have dyed in the shelves in the background of this photo.
More of the dye work is visible in this photo. The jars hold red cabbage dye, and they showed us how it can be changed to green with the addition of an acid (vinegar) and back to red-purple with a base (ammonia).
This log building is the workshop for the Single Brothers. Norris found it interesting that it was constructed with dovetails.
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In the center of town is a square, mostly an open green, but on one side is a small building that was half market, and half fire engine house. Salem claims to have had the first paid municipal fire fighting company in the country.
Seeing the costumed guides and hearing about the separate living quarters for young men and women, you might get the idea the Moravians were something like the Amish, but they were not afraid of technical innovation. This four man fire engine (we'd think of it as a pump) is a great example - it could put water on the roof of the church and after they had this engine, no more residences or major buildings were lost to fire.
Because it was Science Day at the Village, over 700 school children were at hand learning about 18th and 19th century technology. In this next photo, we show a fire-fighting demonstration we might otherwise not have seen, where the children formed a bucket brigade to fill this smaller Fire Engine, while one of the young lads aimed the water at a target set up in the middle of the street.
We broke up our walking tour with a delicious lunch at the Tavern restaurant where we enjoyed what we thought was the best tomato soup we'd ever tasted.
We had pleasant weather for walking around the village. Being at a lower elevation, spring flowers are much in evidence, and the trees have a lot more leaves than we have here in the mountains.
We enjoyed demonstrations in several buildings - some were dark or crowded and we didn't realize the camera had some kind of error and wasn't storing pictures. But here are a few examples - cooking over an open flame -
Making soap from ashes and animal fat.
The Winkler Bakery close to the far end of the town dates to about 1800.
Although in this photo, the baking is done and the oven is cooling down, we did see the bakers working early in the day. We got this photo when we went back to get some bread and Moravian cookies for the trip home, after the school groups were gone.
The cemetery, called God's Acre, was organized in large squares. People were buried by gender rather than family unit and in the earliest days, white Moravians and black converts were all buried here.
But by the 1820's, ideas about blacks and whites even worshiping together had changed and the enslaved blacks formed a separate church and built a log building. The church shown here is a reconstruction - they later built a brick church next door, still owned by the congregation. 131 people, African Americans and non-Moravians were buried next to this church.
Our guide in the church was extremely knowledgeable about the history of the building and the church.
Salem is only about two and a half hours away, but we had not explored North Carolina outside the mountains before making this trip.
