and Logic Studio), and the creation of the The Moravian Soundscapes website follows the book’s structure, which is chronological, beginning with the founding of Bethlehem in 1741 and moving forward to 1782. The book and website also follow a geographic trajectory. Chapter 1 starts broadly with the travels of early Moravian missionaries through the natural environments of Pennsylvania as they encounter Native communities beyond the boundaries of colonial settlements. Chapters 2 and 3 narrow in scope to focus on the internal social and spiritual geographies of the Bethlehem community during the 1740s and 1750s. The final chapter (chap. 4) returns to a broader geographic perspective, detailing the end of Bethlehem’s communal Economy in 1762 and the forced migration of the Native Moravian community into northern Pennsylvania and Ohio during the 1760s and 1770s, leading to the massacre at the Ohio community of Gnadenhütten in 1782. Each chapter reveals the spatial, social, and spiritual structures of Moravian communities through detailed discussions of sound and musical practices that link with sound maps or sound examples on the Moravian Soundscapes website. It is my hope that the audible history components of the website will serve as helpful frameworks for interpreting the historic acoustic environments of Moravian communities.57
As you consider these digital elements, the process of creating them is worth discussing. The process itself has greatly informed my own understanding of sound in historic Moravian contexts. It has been more than 275 years since Bethlehem was founded, and more than 250 years since the Native Moravian communities at Nain, Friedenshütten, and Gnadenhütten, Pennsylvania, were destroyed or abandoned. So, before I could recreate the acoustic environments and singing practices that characterized life in eighteenth-century Moravian communities, I had to first establish the physical locations of many of the nonextant communities, as well as buildings and spaces that had been built over or destroyed since the mid-eighteenth century. This process involved more than two years of fieldwork, mapping, and spatial reconstruction based on archival documents, archaeological data, and georectification of historical maps against modern satellite data. I am happy to say that this was a project that I did not undertake alone. It was a collaborative and interdisciplinary effort involving Mark Sciuchetti, then a doctoral student in geography at the Florida State University, and my husband, sound designer and composer Andy Nathan.
We began the project by conducting fieldwork to collect the GPS locations for all of the sites that existed in Bethlehem in 1758, and all known Moravian mission locations in Pennsylvania, in addition to other neighboring settler and Native communities.58 Some of these settlements, buildings, and places were quite easy to locate. Bethlehem’s Gemeinhaus, and other communal buildings such as the Single Brothers’ House, the blacksmith shop, and pottery shop are either extant or have been rebuilt based on data gleaned from archaeological excavations and other historical evidence. Locating other places, though, often required extensive archival and historical research, as well as some degree of informed speculation based on the location of known geographical features such as streams or hills, or spatial data gleaned from a combination of historic and contemporary maps.
The most important part of the process of locating eighteenth-century places was “learning in place”—walking, driving, and studying the natural and built topography of historic Moravian places by experiencing them in the present. At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate the value of the many days and miles of driving and walking my collaborators and I undertook. When Andy and I, along with our two sons, hiked through the forests along the Moshannon Creek in central Pennsylvania to map and photograph places visited and traversed by eighteenth-century Moravians along the Great Shamokin Path, I didn’t truly comprehend the ways that my historical understanding of those places would be informed by experiencing them with my family in the present. The days that Mark and I spent trekking Bethlehem’s streets, ducking under railroad bridges, and venturing through fields and nearby creeks, provided invaluable knowledge that we would not have gained without experiencing those places in person.61
We learned that modern place names often revealed layers of history that had since disappeared from human memory or archival documents. As we searched for the location of the mission of Friedenshütten, we found that the place where the mission had once stood along Wyalusing Creek was still marked as “Moravian Street.” In our frustrating search for the location of the Rose Inn, when eighteenth-century maps were confusing at best and contradictory at worst, we discovered that a modern street built over the former site of the inn was fortuitously labeled “Rose Inn Avenue.” Nearby, almost completely covered with grass, a memorial stone in the yard of a family home still marked the inn’s location. Even venturing beyond the bounds of Pennsylvania, we discovered, for instance, that the Moravian mission on the Ma Retraite Plantation in Suriname had not completely vanished. The plantation itself had now become a neighborhood bearing the same name in the capital city of Paramaribo. While buildings and memories may have disappeared, historic places were often recorded on the contours of the landscape, or in the names of streets, rivers, or neighborhoods. Modern roads still followed older pathways. Despite the efforts of modern engineers in the 1960s to carve straight pathways through the challenging terrain of the Allegheny Mountains, Interstate 80 conforms for the most part to the ancient contours of the Great Shamokin Path. These historical and modern intersections were discoverable with the right data and with a curiosity to seek the right places.
In the process of looking for past places, though,
