Bethania: The Village by the Black Walnut Bottom

        The Challenge of Writing 250 Years of History

Bethania: The Village by the Black Walnut Bottom

Introduction

From "The Silent Village" by Emma Lehman

There lieth a village on the hill

Beneath the cedar trees

Calm, and peaceful, white and still,

The home of the summer breeze.

No noise, no sound of hurrying feet,

Ever waken the echoes there;

The ivy creeps or the quiet street,

Thru reaches of maiden hair.

Bethania, North Carolina, is the last of its line, a pioneer town founded on June 12, 1759, out of the need to establish the roots of religious freedom. A historically significant town, Bethania is the first planned Moravian town lot in the Wachovia tract of North Carolina. Listed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places, the town became a National Landmark in 2001.

Colonial homes, some still lived in by descendants of the first white Moravian settlers, line Bethania’s main street and are symbols of how so much of the town’s character remains intact. Simple yet elegantly understated, the homes represent the regional architecture of the colonial era in which they were built.

The homes have names, attesting to former owners. On the corner of Loesch Lane and Main Street is a tall, stately house that bears the name Johann Christian Loesch. Loesch’s son, Israel, was a U.S. representative during Reconstruction and president of the Cape Fear Bank and the First National Bank in Salem, which became Wachovia Bank. Across the street on the opposite corner is the Cornwallis house, given the name of a Revolutionary War general who spent the night in the home during a raid and subsequent encampment in the town.

Beyond the distinction of its Main Street homes standing as monuments to an earlier century, Bethania was once a thriving industrial and trade town. The Great Wagon Road of the colonial era brought soldiers, settlers and slaves through the town daily. The longest and costliest plank road of the pre–Civil War South ran 129 miles from Fayetteville on the Carolina coast and ended at the corner of Main Street and Loesch Lane.

What is unique about Bethania today is its history as a community that began as an experiment in melding cultures. Its first settlers were chosen from Moravian and non-Moravian families who created the town in a hostile frontier. In 1766, Bethanians helped found the town of Salem in the newly formed colony of North Carolina, thus contributing to the birth of our nation.

Bethania is the last surviving Germanic linear village of the original Wachovia tract; however, its survival has exacted much from its founding families. Pioneers in the true sense, they survived Indian attacks, dark forces of nature, epidemics, wild animals and soldiers who, during bloody wars on American soil, tried to destroy Bethania’s spirit. The town has endured through the Indian Wars, the War of Regulation, the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, all of which were fought within and around its borders.

Bethania’s most recent battle was fought in courtrooms against annexation. That fight began in 1995 and ended in 1998, leaving an open wound. The war pitted neighbor against neighbor and blacks against whites. Although the lawsuit was upheld three times, the North Carolina Supreme Court reversed the decision. Of the 2,500 ¾ acre tract, less than 400 acres remained intact, and these exclude a large group of African American citizens. I was drawn into the battle, on the side that sought to preserve the land that encompassed all of Bethania’s history. 

North Carolina has been my home away from home for most of my adult life, as a WAC, as an Army wife, and later with all four of my former corporations. Although I wound up based out of Chicago, I knew that someday, I would wind up back in North Carolina for good. I did, in summer of 1991, but not before, I had to move to California for six months, buy high and sell low, learned my son and his partner dropped out of life, agreed to become an (adoptive) mother again at the age of forty something, and then landed in a brand new home in Clemmons.  When the second baby arrived, I flew back to Chicago in 1993, and increased the size of my family to four.

My involvement with Bethania and its history began in 1994 when a Sunday afternoon drive took us exploring out in the country. It seemed everywhere we turned the Yadkin River followed us, and one winding road led to another. 

We were living in a newly built home in Clemmons. But I am an old house person, my husband and I had restored a gentleman’s farmer’s estate in Dekalb, Illinois. Wanderlust for another such property was calling to me.

We passed the Yadkin again and down Reynolda Road when I saw a sign that read Bethania. “Turn here.” I commanded, and within a short moment, we were traveling into the past. I saw an old and worn Mill, a tree-lined street that bespoke of another time, and then a sign that said For Sale.  

“STOP the car!” I commanded. Thankfully there was no traffic as my husband turned onto a dirt road by the corner of Loesch and Main Street. I won’t mentioned what he said, but within a few hours we were buying a home and selling a home, and the next few months became a whirlwind of life-altering activity. No make that years of life-altering changes.

Our first home in Bethania was the Johann Christian Loesch home and uncovering its history, not to mention plaster dust, discovering its nuances and secrets of more then 200 years, was like living in another time. The house needed major work and a major budget to go with that work, so we set to task. This was not without obstacles such as; needing to put in new sills, I Beam supports in the basement, working bathrooms, a working kitchen, gate the property because of small girls and animals and being too close to the street. Then there was the first wave of downsizing the day before we physically moved to Bethania and I found myself in the position of being a recovering corporate executive. Although this was brief, it gave me sufficient time to meet many people, and begin researching the history of my house, and in turn discovering Bethania.  

My experience was like jumping into an ocean. Fortunately, I am a SCUBA diver and knew how to breathe underwater. I have always been passionate about history and antiques, and my life long dream was to open an antique store and write. I would do both one day but not before I followed many more winding roads and paths that took me everywhere.

Such as the Moravian Archives here and in Pennsylvania where my Germanic heritage hails from. Then there was the State Archives in Raleigh, and a dusty local antique store where I found a complete set of “The Records of Moravians in North Carolina.”

I provided much of the supporting material to the law firm of Kennedy, Kennedy, and Kennedy who we outsiders had hired to represent the Bethania lawsuit. We lost on a technicality. Loosing was a blow to us and annexation for many of my friends was painful but we went on with our lives. I joined a new company, unfortunately in less than a year after the company filed bankruptcy. My next company required us to move to another state and so we sold our home, the Johann Christian Loesch house and prepared to move.

One week before the scheduled move, you guessed it – the fickle finger of fate intervened and I was downsized. Our buyers would not back out. Providence intervened again and another historic property came on the market; the Abraham Transou House. And yes this property too, needed a great deal of work, and lots of money. Within a month, the only building on Main Street that housed a business quietly came on the market. This would make a perfect antique shop. Now all I had left to do was write. And I did. Prolifically. The years flew by with a never ending array of rejection letters until one day first an invitation to become editor for a local Women’s magazine and then an interest letter from Women’s Day Magazine.

At the same time I opened my antique shop, I began amassing papers, letters, and documents; even a stock certificate from the Bethania Stock Company, a receipt book from the Bethania post office in 1872, and receipts that were clearly stamped --- the town of Bethania. Later, someone brought me old camera equipment along with boxes of glass negatives and magic lantern slides. They bore the name J. L. Kapp. The name of course was familiar to me, but many of the slides were from all over the country. Kapp had been a photographer and did Stereo View cards. I sold the equipment for the person and most of the recognizable slides, then settled on the remaining ones because they were of Winston and Salem, or so I thought. A few years later, a neighbor was looking through them; they were mostly images from Bethania. 

All of this material led me down another path which led to Salem College in 2002. I wanted to write a book that would preserve all of Bethania’s 2500 ¾ acres. I needed to learn more, I needed to discover more. Bethania would be 250 years old in 2009. I had plenty of time to finish my book.  Scholarly studies sent me on a new journey and more research. So did the internet and discovery of more than 20 linear feet of material on Bethania families in colleges and Universities all over – even Oregon. New primary source materials --- documents, letters, and oral histories I had begun – unraveled an even greater powerful history – Bethania’s influence was far reaching.

This of course sent me on another quest, and I continued on to Goddard College to earn my Masters with the purpose of completing a book on Bethania as my thesis. Several weeks into the program, I decided to write a fiction novel instead.   This too was okay because the work I completed taught me that writing creatively was what I needed in order to write Bethania’s story, not as a history book so to speak, but as a book that would do justice to the rich cultural heritage that I knew Bethania was about.  

A major challenge of writing history is in keeping within the confines of word count that your publisher has given to you, not to mention the images. Before I even got to the 1800s, I had exceeded my total word count as well as image count. Albert Einstein once said that "not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

I hope that you will bare this in mind as I read excerpts from Bethania: The Village by the Black Walnut Bottom. Please enjoy watching a slide show put together by Bowman Gray. These include Faces through Time, images from Bethania’s past taken by J.L. Kapp and others, and Bethania today; images taken by Bowman Gray.  (You will need to have Quick Tine to view show).

From Chapter 1

The Road to Bethania

   “Concerning Bethania,” Spangenberg wrote, “Br. Petrus Boehler brought us this name from Europe for the first little village in Wachovia.” Bethania was named for the garden where Jesus was crucified, Bethany, meaning “House of Dates or Figs.”

   A small party set out for the Black Walnut Bottom on the morning of June 12, 1759, consisting of Bishop Spangenberg, his wife and several of the brethren: David Bischof, Christian Seidel, Jacob Loesch, Kramer, Ranke, Holter, Reuter, Bonn and Hirt. The group came to a halt in a wide valley nestled between two creeks and gentle hills. As it was the Moravian custom to call upon the Lord for a decision by casting lots, Spangenberg set to the task, and the first “Village of the Lord” was born.

  This image of the Black Walnut Bottom

was taken at early daybreak

From Chapter 3

The American Wars for Independence

The French and Indian War had severely depleted Great Britain’s coffers, and the Crown initiated new taxation policies that were not well accepted throughout the colonies. The Proclamation Act signed by King George III in 1763 prohibited further settlement west of the Appalachians and pushed more settlers inland. The passage of the Stamp Act followed on the heels of the Sugar and Currency Acts and launched a volatile period between 1764 and 1789.

A Bethania diarist wrote: During these hard times our dear Father in Heaven has protected us in all dangerous circumstances, and has brought us through even when that seemed impossible…

The Regulator Rebellion was sparked by the dirty ways in which the county sheriffs collected the tax. The rise in debt was epidemic, and thievery became common. An advertisement posted at Bethabara and Bethania summoned six hundred debtors who owed more than ₤1,800 to the stores and taverns. Because many of the regulators were friends and neighbors, ill feelings toward the Moravians simmered. The regulators accused the Moravians of being on the side of the British, and the British accused the Moravians of being on the side of the regulators.

The war of Regulation was over by 1772 but was not quickly forgotten. For most people, this war was the beginning of the fight for Democracy and the end of British rule. 

From Chapter's 4 through 6

Wagon Road to Plank Road

Frederick Marshall wrote: We have made it our rule, in these times and under the new Constitution, to be subject to those in authority over us, and to submit to all laws that they have made, so far as they are not against our conscience, and against the plan which the Saviour has given to the Brethren. –

Independence

The Continental army and subsequent government were now in control, and the next few years were times of conformance and acceptance. No one knows what normal is, but life seemed to be turning around when the last of the troops left Wachovia after Cornwallis’s departure. Peaceful might be a better word to capture the environment, even though there was sadness. The land lay in waste in many parts of the colonies, and once again, the rebuilding of lives took place.

Generation Woes

The pattern for society in Bethania was clearly different than in any other congregation town in Wachovia. When Bethabara requested to have more craftspeople and trades, the church board responded by reinforcing the entire plan for Wachovia, and the growth of Bethabara into anything greater was denied. Bethania followed its own rule and attracted reprimands by the Salem Board. For instance, the upper town families held different beliefs on child rearing:

Such as: Harvesting commencing towards the end of June, a number of young people made themselves guilty of disorderly conduct, for in spite of previous admonishments and warnings, several boys and girls insisted on cutting the grain in mixed company.

This behavior set the trend for the future and a movement away from the “close discipline and regulations of individuals by the church.” The transgressions of the young people and parents from the upper town were the object of many meetings and conferences well into the next century, particularly because the children in the upper town began to influence the children in the lower town and this spread like wild fire to the other Moravian towns in Wachovia.

End of the Lease System

In June 1822, the provincial elders conference voted to have Johann Christian Loesch take over the “farm, tannery, and distillery of Bethania at inventory value.” Loesch’s takeover of these thriving businesses, as well as the tavern, in fee simple was significant as this was “the beginning of the change in holding of the Bethania lands.” The end of the lease system signified the end of Salem Board’s control. More or less, that is, because it still grumbled when Bethania’s inhabitants went against the rules.

A Time of Prosperity

The acts to incorporate the town of Bethania and the Bethania Fire Department were approved in January 1839 by the State of North Carolina. Mysteriously, the records that the town acted upon, instructing it to approve incorporation, disappeared. Yet a slip of paper posted in Bethania states:

All the inhabitants of Bethania are requested to meet at the shop of Elias Schaub on Saturday 13th at early candle light for the purpose of adopting or rejecting the act of incorporation ratified on the 3rd of January, 1839, and an act to authorize the forming of a fire engine company in the town of Bethania, Stoke County.

North Carolina is not called the Rip Van Winkle State without just cause. There is a tale that Bethania fell asleep and never had the meeting that should have established it as a real town. There is another tale that Bethania’s pastors were becoming too domineering and dictatorial, particularly Pastor George Frederic Bahnson, who served the church. Julius T. Belcher took his place, and things more or less quieted down, so the townspeople decided not to pursue a charter—at least, no one has found the slip of paper that might have proved otherwise. This simple oversight (not pursuing a charter) caused Bethania to lose the land suit battle in 1998.

Bethania prospered during the antebellum years.

By 1860 the world was in a Distracted State and War on America soil once again took its toll.

By 1865

The Civil War ended, as far as the eye could see, fields lay fallow, houses empty, and nothing but widows and old men were left in the town and the outlying countryside. Beneath the Carolina blue skies, an eerie quiet settled across the land. By the end of December, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery throughout the United States.

From Chapter 7

Black Roots Bethania Roots

That slavery was an intrinsic pattern in the southern way of life cannot be denied. Although today annexation has severed Bethania’s black roots, slavery is very much a part of Bethania’s history, and its black roots go as deep as those of its first white settlers.

Dr. George Follett Wilson’s personal journal between 1828 and 1830 reflects slavery through the eyes of an abolitionist. Wilson is an outsider, a Yankee by birth, born in Massachusetts, raised in upstate New York and fresh out of a northern medical school when he arrived in Bethania in May 1828.  

Wilson was taken aback by Bethania’s rural landscape, farmlands, haphazard cultivation and abject poverty. He was not impressed with Bethania. “This place looks old,” he commented, “and the houses have the appearance of decay and require repairing and rebuilding.” For the first time in his life, he saw the evidence of slavery. “The Black people are surely degraded and abused. Saw some sold. It is shocking to a person unaccustomed to such scenes. It is not religiously right. It is not just.” Bethania needed a doctor, so Wilson established his practice in the town. Within the first few months after his arrival, he fell in love with Sophia Henrietta Hauser, and they married in June 1829.  Sophia was one of three children born to Philipina Loesch and Johann Heinrich Hauser Jr., who died in 1821. Philipina married Abraham Conrad in 1822 and bore him a daughter named Julia who was six years old when Sophia and Wilson married.

Julia would marry a doctor too, Dr Beverly Jones and together they would build Oak Grove a stately plantation located on Bethania’s countryside, ½ mile from the central town.

We also see slavery through a former slave’s eyes.

Betty Cofer was born into slavery at Oak Grove. She has known Bethania both as a slave and later, as a free woman of color. Her oral history, taken by Mary A. Hicks through the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration in 1937, paints vivid scenes that reflect Bethania’s rich black cultural identity. For many years, Betty’s oral history and its significance to Bethania were unknown, had been misidentified, and attributed to another oral historian. The Internet has also opened the possibility that Betty’s last name was not Cofer but Koger, as descendants and others who have memories of her before her death claim.

“Yes, Ma’am, yes, Sir, come in. Pull a chair to the fire. You’ll have to ’scuse me. I can’t get around much, ’cause my feet and legs bother me, but I got good eyes an good ears an’ all my own teeth. I aint never had a bad tooth in my head. Yes’m, I’m 81, going on 82. Marster done wrote my age down in his book where he kep’ the names of all his colored folks. Muh belonged to Dr. Jones but Pappy belonged to Marse Israel Lash over yonder. . Yes’m, I remember Marse Israel Lash, my Pappy’s Marster, he was a low, thick-set man, very jolly an’ friendly. He was real smart an’ good too, ’cause his colored folks all loved ’im. . . Young’uns always went with their mammies so I belonged to the Joneses.

Many antebellum Southern stories reflect a kinship and friendship between slaves and their white master’s family. When we look backward through time, we often see the world through a different light. Certainly, there was ill treatment of slaves, even in the Moravian towns. As the winds of war escalated, fear of slave uprisings was tantamount. We know though, that the Civil War, as did the War of Regulation, and the Revolutionary War, change the American way of life. By 1860, the halcyon days of plantation life were holding on by a thread. This is evidenced throughout the detailed plantation records kept by Dr Beverly Jones and his wife Julia.

George Bahnson’s words perhaps describe best what transpired during the war years:

The fearful civil strife of a once united people had been going on for years, devastating portions of our land, decimating its once highly favored indwellers, sowing broadcast mourning and lamentations, sundering the most sacred ties uniting man to man, interfering most fatally with the happiness of numberless families, depriving parents of children, children of parents, wives of their husbands, and reducing smiling landscapes into howling deserts.

Slave Cabin located on the Jones Plantation

Photo by Bowman Gray

Aftermath

The old home place was not the same, and within a few months after the departing northern and southern troops passed through Bethania, another terrible sickness swept through the village. This could have simply been one of the seasonal episodes that occurred during past years, or it could have been transmitted by one of the war-torn stragglers who still came through the town. Julia Jones communicated in a letter to a stepbrother in June of 1865:

Since I wrote you one month ago, a terrible sickness came. There were at times ten in the bed at one time. A few weeks after that Alex died, Jo died, Nance’s youngest son, then William, Fanny’s son, just one week after Jack was taken too, and in a very short time. One of Tensey’s daughters afterwards her infant Nellie also one of her girls, France, Nance’s youngest child sickened and died so soon also several infants. I never did go through such troubles. All my help was gone. I hardly knew where to begin with the work. The field hands and all were sick, those that were not in bed were not able to do anything. Four children are all that escaped.

From Chapter 9

God’s Acres

—from “The Silent Village” by Emma Lehman

The marble doors of the houses are shut

The villagers lie asleep;

You wander in vain from place to hut

Their secret they sacredly keep

“Would I were at rest in this village still,”

A mourner wept alone;

“Would I were with them in the quiet hill,

Beneath this mossy head-stone.”

                        Photo by Bowman Gray

Moravians call their graveyards God’s Acre, which stems from the belief that the dead are “sown as seeds” in preparation for Christ’s return. God’s Acre is not really an acre of land; rather, it is a metaphor for “resting place.”  

Slowly over the late eighteenth century, the practice of allowing strangers, or non-Moravians, to be buried in God’s Acre eroded. In 1798, the congregation “renewed its agreement not to allow burials of outsiders in their God’s Acre, unless in exceptional cases. Before the end of the eighteenth century, other sites were referred to as “our Parish Graveyard by the Mill, our God’s Acre for Negroes, or our God’s Acre for Strangers at the Mill.” Because of the wording, it might seem that there was more than one strangers’ graveyards—one for slaves and one for whites. These burial places were officiated over by the Moravian minister and long ago plowed under.

Still, Moravians believed that one’s final resting place should be in a location reserved for peace. Somewhere in Bethania, on gently sloping hills beneath a Carolina blue sky, these strangers’ graveyards have disappeared. What better place to rest than atop a hill, a crest or a ridge, near trees that bloom in spring or carry the scent of fruit in late summer or fall. There may be stones or other markers, or nothing but dirt and clay soil. The dead, buried like roots, sown as seeds, wait for the coming of eternity—ghost shadows flickering in the darkened night, storms howling in the wind, silent breezes gently ruffling through the trees. Bethania’s memories are steeped in history and preserved in time. May the spirit of its people live through the eternities yet to come.

Post Script on the Challenge of Writing History:

The challenge of writing history is also in preserving history. Someone once told me that memory is not history. I disagree and feel that memory can help reconstruct a past that no longer exists.  Just above the Bethania Moravian God’s Acre lies a parcel of land that is up for sale. Along this area is the footpath that connected Bethabara to Bethania where there are still visible traces of the Great Wagon Road. Covered in thick brush, ruts and a flatten bed of ground bare witness to long ago echoes and voices from our state’s history. If the land is sold, most likely town homes will sprout above Bethania’s landscape. I hope that this will not be so.

Thank you for this opportunity to present: The Challenge of Writing History – Bethania: The Village by the Black Walnut Bottom.