The Foundations

The Foundations. The foundations represent the buildings that formed the town.. In 1766, Bethabara was a bustling trades town. The foundations represent the buildings that formed this town when it was at its height. , The footprints of the homes and businesses that once stood here extended beyond the smaller dry cellar foundations you see here. Dry cellars allowed Moravians to keep food fresh through the winter. The community harvested fruits and vegetables from their gardens in warmer months, but were able to store their surplus underground where it was cooler and drier during the winter. Cellars enabled the Bethabara community to escape from the usual hand-to-mouth farming on the frontier and support non-farmers in the community, such as tradesmen, doctors, and other professionals, with the surplus food. , During the move to Salem, some of the buildings were dismantled so the building materials could be used in the new town. This left open cellars where buildings once stood. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bethabara transformed into a small farming community and many of these cellars were filled with stone and subsoil to convert the area into farmland. This theory was confirmed in the early 1960s by archaeologist Stan South, who uncovered fragments of British china and glass, dating the fill dirt to the early nineteenth century. Moravians were expert town planners and cartographers (map makers). In the 1960s, historians and archaeologists were able to assign the cellar ruins to stores, residences, and other structures by matching their location to detailed historic maps. , [Captions] , . Left: 1766 map of Bethabara, when the town was at its peak. , . Center: Bethabara's Gemeinhaus in the 20th century.