Bethania Historic District (Boundary Increase)

Bethania was founded in 1759 as the first planned town in the Moravians' Wachovia Tract, on a 2,500-acre Town Lot surveyed by Philip Christian Gottlieb Reuter. This amendment enlarges an earlier district that protected only the early houses, church and graveyard. The added area, nearly 500 acres, takes in the surrounding working landscape: fertile bottomlands along Muddy Creek, orchard lots, upland fields, and a road system laid out in the eighteenth century. It also includes the stone and timber remains of the 1784 Bethania Grist Mill, with its dam, race and cellar holes. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century houses, including Bungalow, Queen Anne and Colonial Revival examples, reflect continued occupation by descendants of early residents. The expansion counts 45 contributing and 76 noncontributing buildings, six contributing sites and nine contributing structures. Its argument is that the village and its farmland, roads and creeks together preserve the original Moravian town plan.