The Town is regularly laid out, the Streets straight and at right Angles like those in Philadelphia,” John Adams, future president of the United States, wrote to his wife, Abigail, on his first visit to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on February 7, 1777. “It stands upon an Eminence and has a fine large Brook flowing on one End of it, and the Lehigh a Branch of the Delaware on the other. Between the Town and the Lehigh are beautifull [sic] public Gardens.” Adams was marveling at not just a “curious and remarkable Town,” but a Moravian settlement, where the religious movement that had sprouted in the Electorate of Saxony constructed, among other things, a pleasure garden—a cultivated landscape reserved for the contemplation of nature.
At the Moravian Historical Society, in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, through February 16, 2025, Grounds for Meditation: Moravian Pleasure Gardens bears witness that the design of the Moravian gardens continued to change as the needs and tastes of their communities changed, as the orderly flower beds of one era gradually grew into the wildernesses popularized by romanticism. While the historic grounds are no longer possible to see and experience as originally installed, evidence of them remains in drawings and maps, as well as in the recollections of those who found repose and inspiration within, and of those who recorded them for posterity, such as James Henry (1809–1895), writing in Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society (1868), an organization he had founded. “In the early times of 1750 . . . the walk from Christian’s Spring to Nazareth, partly along garden-like fields, partly through the primeval forest of massive oaks must have been such as to awaken in the souls of the simple Brethren who daily pursued that well-worn route, all the spiritual joy that lurked within their hearts.”
The pleasure garden story begins in 1722, when Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf und Pottendorf (1700–1760), a young Pietist nobleman, allowed a group of Protestant refugees from Moravia to establish a settlement at Berthelsdorf, his estate in Saxony, in modern-day eastern Germany. They called it Herrnhut, or the Lord’s Watchful Care. The community would become known as the Moravian Church, and Zinzendorf its leader and prime benefactor. Ten years later, the first Moravian missionaries began establishing congregations across Europe and the Americas. By the mid-eighteenth century, the church elders had also developed a distinctive template for the settlements, with a pleasure garden being an essential component, incorporating flower beds, woodlands, meadows, and summerhouses or other small structures.
Unlike kitchen gardens, medicinal herb gardens, the sacred grounds of God’s Acre or cemetery, or the social and economic environs of the center square, pleasure gardens had a distinctly different purpose, being a physical manifestation of the religious values and virtues of its stewards. Many Moravians lived and worked communally, and gardens and woodlands provided important places to find rest and solitude. Bishop August Spangenberg (1704–1792) took thirty-minute walks twice a day when the weather permitted; Zinzendorf composed hymns in a secluded wooded spot near Herrnhut, where he had built a house for his family. Herrnhut remains the historic and spiritual center of the Moravians, but another important early settlement was Herrnhaag (Lord’s Grove), built in 1738 on a hilltop in the present-day northern German state of Hesse. Herrnhaag was seen as a model for new settlements in Europe and the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, influencing New World landscapes as surely as the Moravian Church had an impact on John Wesley, the father of Methodism. Characteristic components included a central square hosting the Gemeinhaus (community house) and church, streets laid out in a grid, choir houses (communal residences) with gardens, an industrial area, a store, a school, and God’s Acre overlooking the town. Walking paths were forged in the surrounding woodlands, and viewpoints on the tops of hills were established for surveying the surrounding landscape.
The exchange of ideas among European Protestant communities shaped the design of Moravian settlements and gardens. Due to Herrnhut’s location in Saxony, the German baroque style was a primary influence. Elite landscapes such as the gardens of Grosssedlitz, the so-called Versailles of Saxony, home of Augustus the Strong, highlighted perspective views through the use of central corridors, and symmetrical gardens complemented the architecture and tree-lined avenues, or allées, that connected the estate to the chapel or church. Huguenots introduced the Moravians to the central square and open city designs popularized in French urban quarters, while the English provided landscape elements such as hedges and one-story greenery. Moravians adopted these various elements and applied them to their communal settlements. Multiple corridors led to a central square and worship hall, allées organized the townscape, and gardens were adjacent to each communal house.
Niesky, also in Saxony, may have been the most influential settlement in the development of Moravian pleasure gardens. A park called Monplaisir or “my pleasure” was established as part of the settlement’s school grounds in 1770, reflecting the educational philosophy of Bishop John Amos Comenius (1592–1670), who wrote in The Great Didactic (1657) about the importance of outdoor activity, physical education, and observing the natural world. “If this be done, boys will, in all probability, go to school with as much pleasure as to fairs, where they always hope to see and hear something new.” The pleasure gardens at Niesky included distinct landscapes: a formal garden defined by parterres as well as a wooded area with serpentine pathways and irregular flower beds. The latter was intended to simulate a wilderness but was carefully manipulated to suppress nature’s chaos and decay.
An important Niesky school alumnus was architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who had been born at the Fulneck Moravian Settlement near Leeds, England. In 1803 Thomas Jefferson appointed him the United States Surveyor of Public Buildings and he served as superintendent of construction for the Capitol in Washington, DC. A major figure in Moravian achievement, Latrobe created a multi-featured pleasure garden for the White House that surely had as many Moravian lessons as it did echoes of English garden designer Humphry Repton (1752–1818), whom the architect claimed as an influence.
Another Niesky school alumnus, Bishop Charles Gotthold Reichel (1751–1825), had taught there before he was called to serve in 1785 as principal of Nazareth Hall school for boys in Nazareth. Within a year of taking the appointment, he added a pleasure garden to the school campus, designating a little less than an acre of land, west of the baroque-inflected school building and ending at the top of the hill at God’s Acre, for use as a park. The gardens were later enlarged and enriched with trees, shrubs, wildflowers, and exotic specimens collected by members of the Moravians’ worldwide network. Terraced areas climbed the hill, and, at the bottom, a brook fed into a small pool next to a summerhouse. John C. Ogden (1751–1800), an eminent Episcopal minister visiting Nazareth the year before his death, wrote in An Excursion into Bethlehem and Nazareth, in Pennsylvania . . . (1800): “The strait and circular walks, the windings up the hill, the falling gardens ascended by steps, the banks, summer-houses, seats, trees, herbs, fruits, vegetables and flowers are seen in great variety. Most of the American forest trees and many exotic plants are here. It is an elegant garden in miniature.” Noting that one summerhouse was declared “sacred to meditation,” Ogden continued: “Undoubtedly they are indebted in part, to the plans presented by the pencils of their preceptors, who have visited the public gardens and country seats in Europe. It is an assemblage of objects, rarely to be found in such order, taste and variety in North America.”
Admired in their day, as Ogden’s words bear witness, yet now largely forgotten, Moravian pleasure gardens have been a little studied area of landscape architecture. The July 26 UNESCO announcement declaring Pennsylvania’s Bethlehem Moravian Church District as a World Heritage Site—along with Herrnhut in Germany and Gracehill in Northern Ireland, to be known collectively, with the previously designated Christiansfeld settlement in Denmark, as the Moravian Church Settlements—might spur further research into this obscure corner. “Each settlement has its own architectural character based on ideals of the Moravian Church but adapted to local conditions,” UNESCO’s announcement states. “Together, they represent the transnational scope and consistency of the international Moravian community as a global network.” Only the landscape complementing that architecture remains to be studied in greater depth, the discoveries of which will add greater dimension to the impact of the settlements on their individual areas as well as the world around them.
Grounds for Meditation: Moravian Pleasure Gardens is on view at the Moravian Historical Society, Nazareth, Pennsylvania, to February 16, 2025.
SUSAN ELLIS is the executive director of the Moravian Historical Society, and FARRAR LANNON is its former curator of exhibitions and collections.
