The first settlers arrived on November 17, 1753 - twelve Moravian Single Brethren who had walked down from the Christiansbrunn farm near Nazareth, Pennsylvania. They founded Bethabara, which in Hebrew means House of Passage, and the name was honest: Bethabara was always meant to be temporary, a place to live until the real settlements could be built. The French and Indian War interrupted that plan. In July 1756 the Brethren threw up a wooden stockade around the central buildings, and Bethabara became a refuge for terrified settlers from across the region. By May 1759, 120 refugees were camped near the Bethabara Mill. That same June the first planned Moravian settlement opened on June 12, 1759 - Bethania, the German form of Bethany, the Hebrew place of dates and figs. Salem, the great congregational town, came later. The first tree was felled on January 6, 1766. Friedberg followed in 1769, Friedland in 1772, Hope in 1775. Six villages of the Lord, as the Moravians called them. Today only Bethania and the historic core of Salem survive intact.

Bethania has done something remarkable. For more than two and a half centuries it has stayed independent of the city it sits next to. When Winston-Salem began absorbing every Moravian settlement in Forsyth County, Bethania reactivated its 1838-1839 town charter, incorporated as a town again in 1995, and refused to be swallowed. Today it is the only independent, continuously active Moravian town in the southern United States. Historic Bethania, the visitor center and museum that opened in 2007, tells the story of how a 1759 settlement kept its name, its land, and its church through Revolution, Civil War, twentieth-century urbanization, and the slow tide of suburban Winston-Salem. The cemetery is laid out the Moravian way - flat stones, no monuments, the dead arranged in choirs rather than family plots, because in the Lord's house everyone is equal in death.

In 1849 the new county of Forsyth carved itself out of the southern half of Stokes County, and the Salem congregation sold land just north of town for a secular county seat. In 1852 the new town was named Winston for a Revolutionary War officer named Joseph Winston. In 1875 a tobacco trader named R.J. Reynolds opened a chewing tobacco factory in Winston. By 1913 Winston and Salem had so thoroughly merged that they officially became one city. Along the way, in 1879, a German-Moravian banker from Bethania named James Alexander Gray and a Salem merchant named William Lemly founded Wachovia National Bank in the old congregational town. By the time it merged with First Union and moved its headquarters to Charlotte in 2001, Wachovia had become one of the largest banks in the world - and its name, that Latinized version of an Austrian valley spotted by a lost bishop in 1752, was suddenly familiar to bank customers from coast to coast.

The Wachovia Tract has been redrawn so many times that the original 98,985 acres are now split across most of Forsyth County and a slice of Stokes. The Moravians' six villages have shrunk to two. Wachovia Bank's name was retired by Wells Fargo in 2011. But Old Salem still stands - cobblestone streets, brick buildings from the 1770s, the church around Salem Square, God's Acre cemetery where the Easter sunrise service has been held every year since 1772. Historic Bethabara Park preserves the stockade site, the 1788 church, and the Bethabara mill. Bethania remains its own town with its own mayor. The bishop who named the place after the Wachau died in 1792, never seeing how completely his name would stick to a stretch of North Carolina backcountry that, to him, must have looked exactly like home.