18th and 19th centuries
Nazareth was founded in 1740 by Moravian immigrants from Germany. The property that comprises oresent-day Nazareth was purchased from George Whitefield after the construction of the Whitefield House.
Nazareth was initially an exclusive Moravian community by charter, and other faiths were not allowed to purchase property there. It was one of four leading Moravian communities in the Thirteen Colonies; Bethlehem, Emmaus, and Lititz, each in Pennsylvania, were the other three.
In 1735, a small group of Moravian missionaries began working in the newly settled community of Savannah, Georgia, where they sought to evangelize the Native American tribes and minister to the settlers. Governor James Oglethorpe, founder of Georgia, and John Wesley and Charles Wesley, founders of the Methodist Church who were deeply interested in Moravian ideals, came along on the same boat. The Brethren settled along the Savannah River in Georgia. Like the Quakers, the Brethren refused to take part in the war with the Spanish and, as a result, were evicted from Georgia in 1739.
George Whitefield, a widely known itinerant preacher who served as chaplain of Savannah, brought the group of evicted Georgia Brethren north to Philadelphia in his sloop. Whitefield had grandiose plans, including building a school for Negro children on his tract of 5,000 acres (20 km2), called the Barony of Nazareth. He invited the Brethren, who accompanied him to Philadelphia to settle at this location for the time being and hired them to build his school.
By the end of June 1739, the first log dwelling was erected. The workers struggled, the weather proved difficult, and winter soon arrived. They quickly erected a second log house. After its completion, Whitefield returned to Pennsylvania, bristling and angered by theological disputes with certain Moravians, particularly on the issue of predestination, and he evicted the Moravian Brethren.
While evicted from the Barony, Moravian leaders in England negotiated to buy the entire Barony. When Whitefield's business manager suddenly died, Whitefield discovered that his finances, shaky on more than one occasion, did not allow him to proceed with his Nazareth plan, and he was forced to sell the whole tract. On July 16, 1741, it officially became Moravian property. [5]
Nazareth was originally planned as a central English-speaking church village. But in October 1742, its 18 English inhabitants departed for Philadelphia leaving Nazareth largely in the hands of Captain John, a Lenape chieftain and his followers, who refused to leave, even though they no longer owned the land.
In December 1742, Count Zinzendorf, a Moravian benefactor, negotiated a settlement with Captain John, and his tribe moved back into the hinterland. [6]
In 1743, the still unfinished Whitefield House was put in readiness for 32 young married couples who were to arrive from Europe. On January 2, 1744, the couples went overland to Nazareth to settle in the nearly completed Whitefield House. Whitefield House and adjacent Gray Cottage now belong to the Moravian Historical Society. [7]
The result was that Nazareth began to increase in population. Enough visitors were attracted to the town that the Rose Inn was built in 1752 on an additional tract to the north. Two years later, in 1754, Nazareth Hall was built in hopes that Count Zinzendorf would return from Europe and settle in Nazareth permanently, but he never returned to the Americas.
In 1759, Nazareth Hall became the central boarding school for sons of Moravian parents. It later attained wide fame as a "classical academy", which led to the founding, in 1807, of Moravian College and Theological Seminary, now located in Bethlehem. Nazareth Hall Tract was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. [8]
20th and 21st centuries
Up until the mid-1900s, a large part of Nazareth's population was of German origin, better known as the Pennsylvania Dutch. "Dutch" is a corruption of the word "Deutsch", which is German for "German." The Pennsylvania Dutch were spread throughout many counties of southern and central Pennsylvania. Many Pennsylvania Dutch also came from Switzerland and the Alsace region of France, in addition to the modern nation of Germany,
Nazareth's residents' religion reflected a largely German background in evangelical churches of fairly large sizes for such a small town, divided among the Moravian, Lutheran, Reformed (now part of the United Church of Christ), and Roman Catholic worship centers of the town. The town also hosted a fairly sizable Italian and Polish population, which largely attended Holy Family Catholic Church, in the area.
During a great immigration to the eastern Pennsylvania counties of the late 1900s from New Jersey and New York, the population expanded significantly. Developers from the New Jersey area were responding to tighter controls and regulations on new construction in the state of New Jersey by moving their enterprises to Pennsylvania.
This new expansion and housing boom was enabled by the local completion of the interstate system of highways, first begun by former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. In the Nazareth area, this was caused by the completion of the nearby Pennsylvania Route 33, which ran north and south, thereby connecting Interstate 78, U.S. Route 22, and Interstate 80, all of which ran east–west, and the completion of the Interstate 78 southern Lehigh Valley corridor high speed interstate, which connected the Lehigh Valley to New Jersey and New York City to the east and Harrisburg and Pittsburgh to the west.
The Nazareth Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. [8]
United States 
Pennsylvania 
