Education

In 1742, Moravian Church patron Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf's sixteen year old daughter Benigna established arguably the first school for girls in the American Colonies. Permanently settled in Bethlehem since 1749, the Bethlehem Boarding School for Girls – also known as the Bethlehem Boarding School for Young Ladies, Young Ladies Seminary, Moravian Female Seminary and, Moravian Seminary and College for Women – is the focus of a major 2007 expansion* of Bethlehem Digital History Project education content.

Rare primary source documents, manuscripts, personal papers and visual materials, plus significant secondary source texts are newly added. Highlights include August Spangenberg’s 1792 Etwas von der Pflege des Leibes fur Kinder (Something of Bodily Care for Children) along with Zeisberger’s 1803 translation into a Delaware Indian language, a 1790 student “cyphering” workbook, student artwork, school rules, Reichel’s  “Moravian Seminary Souvenir”, and an invaluable new finding aid for the "Female Seminary" portion of the extraordinary collection of materials housed in the Moravian Church Archives in Bethlehem.

James Talarico

* In his introduction to the fourth edition of A History of the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies at Bethlehem, Pa., (1901) J. Mortimer Levering points out that a girls’ school was established in 1742 in Germantown and transferred to Bethlehem in 1743. While maintaining a day school for older girls in Bethlehem, the boarding school operations were moved to Nazareth in 1745. In 1749 the boarding school was returned to Bethlehem. In 1751, space constraints and growing enrollment forced authorities to accept only daughters of Moravian church members. In 1785 the school was reorganized to accept Moravian and non-Moravian students.