Moravian Church Settlements
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How it came to be
After the reformer Jan Hus was burned at the stake in 1415, the Unity of the Brethren arose in Bohemia and Moravia. In the 18th century German-speaking members, pressed by the Habsburg Counter-Reformation, began in 1722 to move to Upper Lusatia in Saxony. Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf took them in on his estate, and so Herrnhut was founded. The name means the Lord's watchful care.
In 1732 two brethren left Herrnhut for the Danish West Indies, the start of the first organised Protestant missionary movement. On Christmas Eve 1741 Zinzendorf and a small group founded a settlement where the Monocacy Creek meets the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania and named it Bethlehem, after the birthplace of Jesus. Each settlement was laid out with a church, a community house, choir houses for the unmarried and the widowed, and a burial ground called God's Acre, and Gracehill in Northern Ireland followed the same model.
Christiansfeld in Denmark was founded in 1773 and named after King Christian VII, who promised a ten-year tax holiday and paid 10 per cent of the cost of new houses. Most of the town was built by 1800. Christiansfeld was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2015, and in 2024 Herrnhut, Gracehill and Bethlehem were added to make a property spanning four countries.
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