Historic Bethania

Our town was established in 1759 as a self-sufficient farming community which allowed both Moravian and non-Moravian settlers. Surveyor Christian Philip Gottleib Reuter designed Bethania to withstand the challenges and dangers of the often hostile frontier landscape during the tumultuous years of the French and Indian Wars. Borrowing from town designs used in Medieval Europe, Reuter clustered the individual home lots in the center of the 2,500 acres that comprised the Bethania Town Lot and surrounded these residential lots with land segregated into orchard lots, bottom land lots, and upland lots. The town included houses, tradesman shops, a church, school, barns, and gardens. Now more than 250 years later, historic Bethania is the only example of a European style “open field” agricultural village remaining in North Carolina. This Town Plan, and many of the historic Moravian-influenced buildings of Bethania, has been preserved to the present.  An agricultural and trades community by design, Bethania exemplifies Old World planning and New World adaptation.  Bethania's 500-acre Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has also received the highly-respected designation of National Historic Landmark.