Colonial Legacy
America’s Oldest Physic Garden
February/March 1996
By LEE ANNE WHITE
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Comfrey thrives in Historic Bethabara Park in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, just as it did 235 years ago when it was first planted by Moravian settlers.
Photography by Lee Anne White
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Quietly cradled among the rolling hills of the
Carolina piedmont is the earliest documented colonial medicinal
garden in America. Established in 1761 to serve the medicinal needs
of Bethabara, the first Moravian settlement in North Carolina, this
physic garden and a kitchen garden from the same time period have
been reconstructed at Historic Bethabara Park in the city of
Winston-Salem.
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Today, Moravia is part of the Czech Republic. The Moravians were
among the first Protestant groups to become established in Europe
during the fifteenth century. For more than 300 years, they
suffered religious
Persecution, which caused them to uproot their community and
resettle, or periodically go into hiding; by the early 1700s, they
had fled to Germany, where they built the town of Herrnhut. From
Germany, they sent missionaries to many areas in the world,
including America, where they established a strong foothold in
Pennsylvania. In an effort to carry their religion to other parts
of the country, Moravians in 1753 purchased a 100,000-acre tract in
the backcountry of North Carolina. Missionaries established
Bethabara—Hebrew for “house of passage”—as a temporary settlement
on the new frontier while they laid plans for a more permanent
central town, which would become known as Salem.
In Bethabara, the Moravians built homes, opened shops, and
planted community gardens. They laid out the gardens according to
the medieval patterns that they had known in Europe: rectangular
beds or plots bordered by sod, divided by paths of grass, fine
gravel, or tanbark, and fenced for protection from wild animals.
Because the gardens were meant for sustenance, they contained
mostly vegetables and herbs. Seeds and plants came from Moravians
in Germany, Moravian settlements in Pennsylvania, towns along the
North Carolina coast, the city of Charleston, South Carolina, and
other nearby growers.
Christian Gottlieb Reuter, a royal surveyor in Europe before he
came to America, maintained a land register of the Moravians’ new
property. Although he was not a botanist, he knew European plants
well and kept detailed records of Bethabara’s gardens. It is from
his records that volunteers at Historic Bethabara Park have been
able to reconstruct the medicinal garden—known at that time as
Hortus Medicus —and the accompanying communal kitchen garden.
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