The Moravians Found Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On Christmas Eve 1741, Moravian settlers founded Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a year after the church's Mohican mission at Shekomeko, in present day Dutchess County, New York, had given the Moravians their first foothold among Native American communities on the North American mainland. Bethlehem grew from that founding into the movement's principal North American base, the settlement other Moravian missions on the continent would organize around and be sent out from.

The founding at Bethlehem did not close off further expansion, it opened it. Missionaries working from the base the settlers established there went on to found a Labrador settlement at Nain in 1771 and a Cherokee mission at Springplace, Georgia, in 1801, each one extending a North American missionary effort that had begun at Shekomeko only a year before Bethlehem itself was founded.

What founding Bethlehem changed for the Moravians' spread was permanence in North America: a mission effort that began with a single outpost among the Mohicans in 1740 gained, within a year, a settled base capable of supporting missionaries across a continent for the better part of a century, from the Labrador coast to the Cherokee towns of Georgia, long after the original Shekomeko mission itself had ended.