Historic Bethania Protection Initiative ~ 75 acres protected
Forsyth County
Historic Bethania was the first of 35 planned agricultural villages within the 100,000-acre Wachovia Tract when it was settled in 1759 by members of the Moravian Church. In 1976, 50 acres of Bethania were designated as a National Register Historic District, which was enlarged in 1991 to include the 400-500 acres that best reflect the original design of the town. It was one of fifteen places in the country to be designated as a National Historic Landmark on August 27, 2001.
Surveyor Christian Philip Gottleib Reuter designed Bethania to withstand the challenges and dangers of the often hostile frontier landscape during the tumultuous years of the French and Indian Wars. Borrowing from town designs used in Medieval Europe, Reuter clustered the individual home lots in the center of the 2,500 acres that comprised the Bethania Town Lot and surrounded these residential lots with land segregated into orchard lots, bottom land lots, and upland lots. The town included houses, tradesman shops, a church, school, barns, animal husbandry facilities and gardens. Now more than 200 years later, historic Bethania is the only example of a European style “open field” agricultural village remaining in North Carolina.
Just eight miles from downtown Winston-Salem, Bethania is currently designated as a future growth area in Forsyth County’s Legacy Development Guide (adopted 2000). Census figures indicate the increased growth in this area: Winston-Salem grew 29.5% and Forsyth County grew 15.1% from 1990 to 2000. Since the Piedmont is one of the most rapidly expanding areas in North Carolina, these growth rates are expected to continue in the future. Additionally, the construction of the Winston-Salem Northern By-Pass will impact Bethania on both its northern and southern ends due to the location of two of the proposed interchanges within three miles of the town and increase development pressures even further.
Piedmont Land Conservancy first began working with the Town of Bethania, community members, and the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources to permanently protect the open and forested lands surrounding the residential area of Bethania in 1997. With the designation of Bethania as a National Historic Landmark Area and increasing development pressures, it is vital to the preservation of Bethania’s nationally significant historic landscape that PLC and our partners continue to work quickly to protect the remaining critical open lands that surround Bethania as recommended in a recently completed Bethania Land Protection Plan.
PLC is pleased to relate the following conservation success stories in Historic Bethania.
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