Bethania Historic District

Bethania in Forsyth County, North Carolina, is a village founded in 1759 as a self-sufficient Moravian farming community. The district takes in the whole village, which in 1975 was no larger than at its nineteenth-century peak. Of its thirty-four buildings, thirteen predate the Civil War. The original plan survives: house lots flank a single main street, with a cemetery called God's Acre east of the former square and garden lots beyond. Two-story houses with fieldstone foundations, white clapboard walls, steep gable roofs and shed-roofed porches sit against a fieldstone sidewalk. They are dominated by the brick Moravian church, built 1806-1809 and rebuilt within its walls after a 1942 fire. The houses include log buildings and frame houses with brick nogging, many remodeled around 1850. One house has parlor wall paintings attributed to Naaman Reich. Only one building, a ca. 1930 commercial structure, is considered an intrusion. Moravian church records document the town's history.