OId Salem (Winston-Salem, North Carolina)

 museum, place with historical importance

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www.oldsalem.org

Old Salem is a living history museum that operates within the restored Moravian community Salem.

Salem was originally settled in 1766 by Moravians, members of a Protestant faith that first began in 1457 in the Kingdom of Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. The first exiles (in 1722) to the estate of Count Zinzendorf, the founder of the Moravian Church, came from the March of Moravia, one of the Czech Crown Lands, hence the nickname of the denomination officially called the Unitas Fratrum or Brüder-Unität or Unity of Brethren. From an earlier settlement in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, they came to the colony of North Carolina in 1753. The central town of a 98,000-acre tract named Wachovia was Salem, where construction began in 1766. The residents focused on skilled trades, rather than farming.

The community merged with nearby Winston many years later, in 1913, and many of Salem's historic buildings remained until the 1950s, when Old Salem Inc. (a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation [1]) was formed to protect threatened buildings, restore the town, and operate portions of it as a museum.