Exploring Trade and Race at Old Salem

By Camille Williams

I am a big fan of immersive historical museums, and Old Salem Museums and Gardens in Winston-Salem, North Carolina is an enjoyable example. While the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts’ Furr Moravian Gallery introduced me somewhat to the history and objects of this historic town, visiting the numerous restored buildings filled me with a sense of wonder and excitement.

Salem started as a planned colony founded in 1766 by the Moravians, a missionary sect of Protestants from Herrnhut, Germany. The community members who established Salem came by way of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the first American Moravian settlement. Rather than primarily exporting agriculture or cash crops, they attracted commerce from regional communities, including with indigenous communities, as a trade center. They specialized in trades such as pottery, tailoring, and metalworking, mastering techniques and aesthetics they carried from across the Atlantic and down that Great Wagon Road.

All non-Moravian visitors had to stay in the Salem Tavern, where everything was billed á la carte, like your least favorite budget airline: tea, brandy, hay for your horse, straw for your bed, etc. Unfriendly to outsiders, the church leadership controlled all daily life and funded international missions. They also oversaw the use of enslaved people. Toward the south end of the historic area lies the restored African Moravian Church museum and African American Graveyard. These structures helped me contemplate how Black Moravians navigated the complexity of their religious-racial identity in Salem. While the church excluded enslaved individuals from baptism, the African American community in Salem built sacred space to cultivate community and resist their dehumanization before and after emancipation.

I was most captivated by the objects and story of the skilled potter Peter Oliver, who purchased his freedom and stayed in Salem afterward. He lived and worked for a time in the Single Brothers’ House, where all free unmarried Moravian men — whether young, old or widowed — lived, worshiped, and apprenticed in different trades. (There was a Single Sisters’ House, too.) We saw many of their pieces on display in the house and in MESDA.

The home of the Vogler family reflects the shift in the town’s trajectory toward a society where industry and capitalism held more sway than the church. I relished conversing about John Vogler’s business tactics with a guide in John Vogler’s silver workshop, where he began servicing the community by repairing clocks. My favorite area, however, was the dining area that displayed some of Mrs. Vogler’s Berlin needlework, a craze that caught on quite early among the women of Old Salem in the mid-1800s.

By 1848, with the establishment of the cotton farming and milling industry, the area of Winston-Salem basically became secular. (Our hotel, the Historic Brookstown Inn, was the site of one of the most formidable textile mills). Touring the preserved streets, businesses, and churches of this former colonial town made its people feel much closer. As both a stranger and a guest in Salem’s living history museums, I loved finding the compelling human stories nestled in these recreations of ordinary life. If I have an excuse to return to Winston-Salem, I’ll look forward to delving deeper into the material world of Old Salem — and to try some Moravian pastries.