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INTRODUCTION

Sounding New Histories of the Moravian Missions

Denk an sie und ihre müh, Heiland,	Think of them and their efforts, O Lord,
sie haben den rechten paß.	For they have the true knowledge.
Wo sie gehn, laß gnade wehn,	Wherever they go, let your mercy flow,
und der verklä[r]ger verliere was.	And those who complain will lose.
In sankt Thomas und Barbies,	In Saint Thomas and Barbados,
Capo, Ceylon, Acra, Crüs,	Capo, Ceylon, Accra, St. Croix,
Pensilvanien, Algier, Grönland,	Pennsylvania, Algiers, Greenland,
Surinam, und hier.1	Suriname, and here.

THE WINTER OF 1782 WAS PARTICULARLY BITTER. AT the Moravian mission of Gnadenhütten along the Tuscarawas River in the Ohio Country, little remained of the carefully planted corn crops from the previous summer. Wind blew incessantly through the missions’ abandoned fields and homes, flattening the cornstalks and whistling through the cracks of walls. Frost lay thick on gardens, roofs, and pathways. The well was frozen solid. But in early March, more than one hundred Delaware and Mohican Moravians returned to the mission after their forced removal in the fall of 1781 by British and Wyandot soldiers.² Throughout the winter, the Native Moravian congregation had lingered in captivity along the Sandusky River in the Wyandot-controlled Captives’ Town. The German missionaries and three Native elders who served their community were imprisoned by the British at Fort Detroit, suspected of sending military intelligence to the Americans at Fort Pitt. Caught on the western boundary of the American Revolution, a global conflict that stretched from Ohio to India, the Moravians were left to eke out a meager existence far from their agricultural plantations on the Tuscarawas. After several months of near starvation, the desperate refugees risked a return to Gnadenhütten in early March to harvest what little remained of their corn.

As the Moravians worked in the cornfields near Gnadenhütten on the morning of March 7, there was little conversation. Ice crystals filled the air, refracting and amplifying the sounds of the wind. Overhead, red-tailed hawks, mourning doves, and black-capped chickadees spun and called, eager for corn kernels or insects frightened in the passage of the harvesters. The river ran rough despite the ice blocks that littered its surface, and the splashes of otters and muskrats mixed with the dampened biophony of water striders, sauger, bass, and walleye. Flathead catfish and crawfish dredged the riverbed. The reeds rustled in the damp marshes on the river’s bank. The harvesters did not hear the militia coming. Despite the size of the company, 160 men from Washington County, Pennsylvania, emerged unheard from the forest. Their muster had been sounded to raze Gnadenhütten and its sister missions of Schönbrunn and Salem to the ground in retaliation for Delaware and Wyandot attacks and the killing of Scots-Irish settlers along the Pennsylvania–Ohio border. No longer would the Moravians be allowed to trade secrets with the Delaware chief, Netawatwees, at Gekelmukpechunk (Newcomerstown). Although the militiamen likely knew that the Delaware and Mohican Moravians were not responsible for the recent raids on Scots-Irish homesteads, their desire for retribution was strong. For them, the stakes were high—the very safety and security of the homes and farmsteads of Washington County and other settler communities in western Pennsylvania.

By the evening of March 7, the little mission settlement of Gnadenhütten resounded with a cacophony of voices in English, German, Delaware, and Mohican. This clamor of tongues was recorded in diary records, letters, and conversations for decades to come: the songs, speeches, and prayers of the Moravians as they begged for mercy from their captors; and the arguments of their captors as they debated whether to take the Moravians as hostages to Fort Pitt, or to kill them and burn their villages. In the end, the most vocal militiamen persuaded all but eighteen of their number to herd the Moravians into “killing houses.” The following morning, twenty-eight men, twenty-nine women, and thirty-nine children were bludgeoned, tomahawked, scalped, and burned. No one cared to write down or remember the terrible thud of a cooper’s mallet on bone, or the dripping of blood through floorboards; the murmurs and cries of the dying, crushed together in piles in the mission buildings; or the heavy breathing of the Pennsylvanians as they methodically killed ninety-six unarmed people. But some sounds were remembered: the weeping of Nathan Rollins as he tomahawked nineteen people and still felt no relief from having lost his father and brother to Wyandot raiders. The sounds of the dying Moravians subsumed into the crackling fires of burning buildings and the drunken yells of the militia, as remembered by two boys, Jacob and Thomas, who escaped. Militiaman Obadiah Holmes would later write of the quiet remorse of the eighteen abstaining Pennsylvanians who sat huddled on the riverbank, as far away from the atrocities as they dared to creep.³ And Jacob and Thomas would later recount to the missionary David Zeisberger at Sandusky the jubilant shouts of those who spent the night singing and telling stories about the destruction of the mission and the justice they had exacted from the Moravians.⁴

For those who escaped, perpetrated, or heard tales of the massacre in the days, months, and years following “Gnadenhütten,” it was the sounds of that day that were especially remembered. As the years passed, and the horrors of the massacre dimmed, smaller and perhaps lesser sounds were forgotten. But the singing of the Moravian Christians as they prepared for death lingered persistently in legends of the massacre. When the first reports of the event were sent to the North American headquarters of the Moravian Church at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, they all related a sonic story of the martyrdom of the Delaware and Mohican Moravians, who had “die ganze Nacht Hymns u. Psalms gesungen [sung hymns and psalms for the whole night].”⁵ It was through their songs that the Native martyrs had achieved, in the Moravian cosmology, a good death. Their sung prayers had allowed them passage from the mortal world and their own physical suffering into the spiritual realms beyond all pain. The fact that the Native martyrs spent their final hours singing Christian hymns, as was customary in German Moravian communities at the point of death, was proof of their sincere adherence to Christianity, in the opinion of church elders. Zeisberger was certain that the Native Moravians had died as true Christians, since they “began to sing hymns and spoke words of encouragement to another until they were all slain.”⁶ Even in 1792, ten years after the massacre, when the missionary Johann Heckewelder lodged for the evening in Washington County, he found that the Scots-Irish communities where many of the perpetrators still lived remembered the hymns of the Moravians: “I . . . was invited to supper by Mr. van Sweringen, Esq. The good man spoke about the massacre of our Indians, threw his hands together over his head & said: ‘I have heard from the lips of the murderers themselves that they killed them while they were praying, singing, and kissing,’ & he was not surprised that . . . great blood-guilt lay upon the land and must be atoned for.’”⁷

For the lawyer, Mr. van Sweringen, and others in his community, it was not just the murders that had brought “great blood guilt” upon their communities. Gnadenhütten was not the first or the only massacre to occur during the American Revolution. However, it was set apart from similar atrocities for one reason: the perpetrators had refused to recognize the distinction between Christian and non-Christian Native Americans.⁸ Their urgent desire to extact retribution for their own murdered family members and friends had impelled them to heedlessly kill innocent men, women, and children even as they “began to sing hymns and spoke words of encouragement and consolation to each other.”⁹ Despite the European-style houses and spatial design of the Ohio missions, and the prospect of Native Christians dressed in very much the same manner as the members of the militia, the Pennsylvanians were not interested in believing these were “peaceful Indians.” In the years following the massacre, both the fledgling United States government and nativist movements among Native communities in Ohio and Indiana would agree that the blood guilt of the murders at Gnadenhütten rested squarely on the fact that Christians had killed Christians. Two decades later, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh would remind future president William Henry Harrison: “You recall the time when the Jesus Indians of the Delawares lived near the Americans, and had confidence in their promises of friendship, and thought they were secure, yet the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus?”¹⁰ The truth was that the Christian songs and prayers of the Moravians had not saved them from death or tremendous suffering.

Song and Sound in the Moravian Missions

The massacre at Gnadenhütten raises a number of difficult, but important, issues. The ninety-six people who perished there died partly as a result of their tenuous existence at the boundaries between cultures, ethnicities, nations, and religions. What had begun in the 1740s as an attempt by German missionaries to create new multicultural Christian utopias in New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania had ended tragically in the death of many of these same Delaware and Mohican Moravians along the Ohio frontier. Although singing had for a brief time in the early history of the Moravian missions created a space for exchange of spiritual and cultural ideas between Delaware and Mohican communities and Moravian missionaries, ironically it was those very hymns that would linger most powerfully in memories of the massacre.

Working forward in time from the founding of the first Moravian settler community at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1741, to the massacre at Gnadenhütten, Ohio, in 1782, this book positions song and sound at the center of interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in eastern North America. It is no coincidence that the singing of the Native Moravian congregation at Gnadenhütten persisted in memories of the massacre. Hymns were central not only to the Moravians’ missionary philosophies, but also to daily Christian practice and life-ways in mission communities. Hymns and rituals involving singing served as sonic markers of history, place, and identity. The role of hymns in eighteenth-century Moravian life accomplished what Gary Tomlinson has termed “songwork,” which he defines as the place and efficacy of song in given societal circumstances.¹¹ Moravian hymns did cultural work. They were sung at weddings, funerals, and baptisms; they accompanied manual labor; they served as forms of greeting and celebration; they comforted the sick and dying; and they regulated personal mental health. Hymn singing was not confined to the sacred space of a worship hall, but integrated into daily life.¹² Moravians envisioned hymns as powerful tools to integrate people into their communities and to communicate core Moravian values both inside and outside of their communities. Study of Moravian hymnody yields a deeper understanding not only of the relationships between missionaries and Native Christians, but also of the connections of Moravian mission communities with the wider world they inhabited.¹³

Studying hymnody as it is embedded within historical cultures of hearing and listening is important to understanding concepts of social and religious identity and place both for European and Native Moravians. Just as religious experiences so often happened through ordinary day-to-day, person-to-person exchanges, experiences of sound were similarly intimate and heard within the confines of a meeting space, worship hall, or bedroom, or were bounded by the wider soundscapes of communities or the acoustic ecologies of the natural environment. This is as true of Moravian missions as it is of other historic and modern communities. In the context of a time period in American history when the border between settler and Native communities and nations was a shifting spatial and cultural space, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and the world around them. These cultures of hearing and listening encompassed and also went beyond musical traditions such as song and hymnody. The natural and human environments of early Pennsylvania were comprised of complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic soundscapes. Study of these acoustic environments is important to understanding the social, religious, and spatial relationships that characterized life in both Native and settler communities. The closer we can come to comprehending how early Americans heard their world, the closer we will be to critically understanding not only the history of the Moravian missions but also the difficult and often violent histories of the emergence of the modern American nation on Native soil during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the American Revolution (1775–1783).¹⁴

Yet, despite the importance of sound and song to the Moravians, there have been no comprehensive attempts to study their mission communities and missionary practices from that perspective. While there is a vast and growing literature on the Moravian missions and encounters between Indigenous peoples and missionaries in early America, only recently have scholars begun to incorporate information about musical practices in Moravian mission contexts.¹⁵ Of particular note are studies by Walter Woodward, as well as Rachel Wheeler and me, on the indigenization of Moravian hymnody and the role of song as a meditator of cultural interactions between Moravian missionaries and Native Christians.¹⁶ These studies also intersect with recent publications on music and Christian missions in colonial contexts more broadly, including Glenda Goodman’s work on Native-language psalmody in New England and the soundscapes of colonial encounters, and studies by Kristin Dutcher Mann and Geoffrey Baker on music in Spanish mission contexts.¹⁷ Although music and sound are often relegated to the margins of history, or remain under the purview of musicological inquiries, sensory perceptions and cultural practices surrounding sound are important ways of understanding Indigenous responses to colonialism. This is especially true because hymns and other musical forms often embed traces of Native agency even when contained within the archival records of settler communities that are often dominated by non-Native voices.¹⁸

Recovering the sonic history of the Moravian missions also restores a part of American history that is often overlooked. In early America, sounds and silences possessed the power to unite and divide, to produce understandings and misunderstandings, and to constitute adaptive or destructive strategies for navigating an unprecedented period of cultural shift and physical copresence between European settlers and Native nations and communities. Studies by Richard Cullen Rath, Peter Charles Hoffer, Geoffrey Baker, and Sarah Keyes have demonstrated that colonial efforts to remodel the landscapes of the Americas after traditional European settlement patterns also included transformation of the soundscapes, or aural landscapes, of the Americas to resemble the familiar soundscapes of European places.¹⁹ As Sarah Keyes has argued, building fences, felling trees, and effecting other physical changes to particular ecological environments went hand in hand with transforming the American landscape into a civilized soundscape of ringing axes, lowing cattle, and clanging bells. Indigenous peoples reacted against this physical and aural encroachment, and the sounds of ritualized speech and music became crucial in encounters between colonial settlers and Native communities.²⁰

Soundscapes also defined the nature of both settler and Native communities and their geographic boundaries. The ability to control the aural dimension of landscapes, places, and communities was inextricably intertwined with struggles for power and access to natural resources. When Alexis de Tocqueville toured America to observe new systems of government, he also observed a process of sonic colonization of America’s natural environment, including its fauna: “As soon as a European settlement forms in the neighborhood of territory occupied by the Indians wild game takes fright. Thousands of savages wandering in the forest without fixed dwelling did not disturb it; but as soon as the continuous noise of European labor is heard in the vicinity, it begins to flee and retreat toward the west, where some instinct teaches it that it will find limitless wilderness.”²¹ This sonic space of colonization, according to de Tocqueville, stretched for almost two hundred miles west of continually advancing eighteenth-century colonial settlement.

Moravian communal, environmental, and religious soundscapes, and their attendant hymn traditions, can be understood as colonial structures that attempted to standardize, indeed to colonize, indigenous soundscapes, musical practices, and religious traditions. Moravian Christianity and the Moravian missions were intertwined with the process of colonial settlement, in the way that Matthew Hunter Price has framed Methodism as a perpetuator of colonial settler networks.²² Religious networks, such as the transatlantic missionary enterprise of the Moravian Church, were used for the economic and social gain of the worldwide Moravian Church. While these mission networks sometimes advanced the purposes of Native Christians in surviving the damaging effects of colonization, European Moravians and the church government certainly also received distinct economic advantages from their connections with the British and Danish empires that were not easily accessible to Native Christians, or which harmed them. The church purchased lands taken from Indigenous peoples through these colonial networks in places as geographically diverse as Greenland and Suriname, and thrived commercially on a global scale. In Pennsylvania, the Moravians acquired the land to build Bethlehem as a consequence of the Walking Purchase—the deceitful stripping and repurposing of Delaware traditional lands by the colonial government in Philadelphia. As George Tinker has shown, even with good intentions, missionary encounters often equated or presaged acts of cultural genocide and forced relocations of Native people.²³

However, it is also important to note that there has never been a consistent or monolithic Christian missionary practice. Rather, missions are entirely dependent on the particular Christian sect and also the local cultural, social, and political context in which the missions operate. In the case of the Moravian missions, if we leave the narrative at the point of cultural genocide and seizure of Native lands, we may risk discounting the ways that individuals and indeed whole Native communities adapted and found meaning in new and changing traditions and soundscapes, despite the imposed structures of the Moravian Church or colonial agendas. Although Moravian hymn singing and the soundscapes of mission communities were a form of colonialism, on an individual and community level, people were modifying hymns and adapting them. Native Moravians were not passive actors enmeshed in colonial processes. In studying the Moravian missions, we might take some inspiration from Sarah Rivett’s reexamination of missionary transcriptions of Native American languages. Rather than emphasizing a process of language erasure, Rivett has sought to highlight the adaptive power and survivance of Native languages. Even as missionaries sought to convey Christian theology through new linguistic mediums, Native languages often resisted simple acts of translation, instead preserving and encoding different theologies and religious worldviews in their very structures and grammars. While many Native American languages ceased to be spoken languages during several centuries of colonial contact, Rivett argues that the essential grammatical elements of those languages survived in missionary transcriptions to encode the cultures and religions they represented.²⁴

So, what did the soundscapes of Moravian missions encode? Did Moravian hymns embed the survivance of cultural ways? Did these hymns represent the concerns of Moravians from Delaware and Mohican backgrounds, as well as from German backgrounds? Both Native and European Moravians accessed Christianity through music and ritual. It should not be assumed, though, that Native Christians accepted or even simply mimicked German Moravian hymns and rituals under duress or because of Moravian impositions. Music, hymns, processions, choirs, feast days and celebrations, baptisms, and other Christian rituals certainly created spiritual connections and fostered understandings of commonality, but as Jane Merritt has argued, “Moravian theology [also] influenced the development of a distinctive native Christian religion.”²⁵ Recent scholarship on the history of Christian missions in the eighteenth-century Northeast has turned toward studying Native Christianity not from an either-or-paradigm of conversion versus nonconversion, but from a perspective that seeks to uncover how Native peoples appropriated elements of Christian theology or practice while also negotiating the drastic changes in their communities and the natural environment caused by colonization. This type of approach places Native stories at the center, rather than European American conceptions of religious conversion or environmental transformation.²⁶ In Moravian communities, Native Christians were active in both music production and performance. They became vocalists and instrumentalists, they learned to build musical instruments, and they copied music. As they helped to create and shape the musical repertories of their communities, they added their own touches to musical manuscripts, instruments, and compositions. While missionaries may have simply desired to preach the Gospel through their own particular style of sung Christian community articulated through hymns, the process of becoming Moravian allowed Native Christians considerable space to develop indigenized forms of Christianity and music-making.²⁷

The legacy and history of Moravian hymnody is also the legacy of a musical tradition that represented Native culture and the value of adaptation and the building of relationships and cultural ties even in the face of colonialism. This process can be seen in many different modern-day Native-language hymn traditions, such as the Catholic and Protestant hymns of the Anishinaabe and Kiowa, or the adapted Christian repertory of Inuit Moravians. Although in both instances, these musics were originally introduced by missionaries as a strategy to extinguish Native music and worship, for many Anishinaabe and Inuit people today, singing these pieces in Native languages, and adapting their performing practices, has become a way to maintain traditions and a sense of communal integrity in the face of rapid globalization and cultural instability.²⁸ As Native scholar Lisa Brooks has commented on historic traditions of Native Christianity in New England:

In many indigenous communities, the practice of Christianity in Native New England was syncretic, combining indigenous and European spiritual practices, taking on its own character in relation to particular brands and movements of Christianity, and becoming a staple of life for many families, thus part of the fabric of communal identity and history. Now, we might not like that so many of our ancestors sought refuge in Christianity, and we may be able to see clearly in retrospect the damaging impact of such choices, but we should not deny our own histories and what we might learn from them or fall into the illusion that those choices made them somehow less Indian.²⁹

Both Brooks and Native literary scholar Craig Womack argue for the inclusion of possibilities, such as Christian piety and knowledge, as ways to expand our historical understandings of Native individuals and communities, instead of limiting our understandings of Native experience.³⁰ Christianity was intertwined with colonization. But the story does not end there. In the case of the Moravian missions, the particular story of both Native and European attempts to create what Juanita Little, a Mescalero Apache Catholic sister, has described in the present day as a “world-wide [Christian] family,” became intertwined in the eighteenth century with the geographic position of mission communities on the relentless frontier boundary of European colonization and Native settlements.³¹ As Daniel Richter, James Merrell, and Katherine Faull have argued, early Pennsylvania was a place where it was still possible for shared communities to exist, and where Native and settler interests were not mutually exclusive, but still in flux. The strict marking of people by racial categories was a consequence of the eighteenth-century wars that shattered both settler and Native communities. This book tells the story of a Pennsylvania that existed before, during, and following those wars. The history of the Moravian missions intersected with this unprecedented period of political, environmental, and cultural instability, and weaving music and sound back into these well-known historical events in early American history gives us a new perspective not only on the Moravian missions, but also on an important time period in the mid-eighteenth century when peaceful coexistence still seemed possible despite the pressures of colonization.³²

A Brief History of the Moravian Missions

Pennsylvania’s Moravian communities existed within a network of settler and Native communities in North America, as well as a wider, transnational network of Moravian places and people. Both of these networks would have important implications for the fate of the Pennsylvania missions. Beginning in the 1730s, the German Moravian Church had established mission communities across the Atlantic World—the largest Protestant missionary enterprise of the eighteenth century. See website Intro.1, Timeline: “Moravian Missions in North America, 1740–1794.” In constructing their mission network, Moravian Church leaders were adept at capitalizing on the existing trade and political structures of the British and Danish empires. The first missionaries left Germany in 1732 to minister to West African slaves in the sugar plantations of the Danish West Indies, and the following year a mission ship sailed to Danish-controlled Greenland to work with Inuit communities. Church elders, many of whom were members of the European nobility, also established connections in London that allowed them to send missionaries to the British colony of Georgia. The first Moravians in North America arrived in Georgia in 1735 with the aim of converting the local Creek and Cherokee population and slaves who worked in rice plantations of the low country. In 1752, a mission ship arrived on the rugged coast of Labrador. By the late eighteenth century, the Moravian missions in North America extended over a vast geographic distance from coastal Labrador to North and South Carolina (map I.1).³³ See website Intro.2, Static map: “The Moravian Atlantic.”

In the northern American colonies, the founder of the Moravian Church, Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, outlined a plan for working with Indigenous communities in New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, entitled the Heiden Collegia (Plan for the Heathen) (fig. I.1a–b).³⁴ When he created this plan in 1742, Zinzendorf and other church elders had already established a central mission community in 1741 at Bethlehem in eastern Pennsylvania. In the summer and fall of 1742, Zinzendorf traveled from Bethlehem north of the Kittatinny Mountains into New York and the river valleys of the Susquehanna, to meet with the leaders of various Haudenosaunee, Delaware, Shawnee, and Mohican settlements.³⁵ Based on these meetings, his mission plan focused on several communities he believed would be receptive to Christianity. Two of the most important Native communities in Pennsylvania—Shamokin, a Haudenosaunee-controlled town at the confluence of the western and northern branches of the Susquehanna, and Wyoming (called by the Moravians, Wajomick), a primarily Shawnee and Delaware settlement in the Wyoming Valley—were to become central hubs for a Native Christian network beyond the borders of European settlements. Zinzendorf’s mission plan also included Otstonwakin on the West Branch of the Susquehanna, a settlement led by a French Canadian and Algonquin woman named Madame Montour. A mission center at Otstonwakin would allow the Moravians access to the Great Shamokin Path that led across the Allegheny Mountains to Native communities in the Ohio and Beaver River watersheds, and the Great Warrior’s Path that led north to the Council Fire of the Six Nations at Onondaga near Lake Ontario. The existing Mohican mission at Shekomeko in Dutchess County, New York, was to serve as a central hub from which Mohican Christians could be sent to form new mission villages in the Upper Colonies.³⁶

Map I.1 The Moravian Atlantic (created by Mark Sciuchetti and Sarah Eyerly).

Fig. I.1a–b Copies of Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, “Die Heiden Collegia,” 1742. Personal papers of Zinzendorf, PPZdf 48, and MissInd 217.12b, MAB.

This detailed vision for Christianizing Native Americans living in eastern North America may have been conceived by Zinzendorf, but its success rested in the hands of Moravian missionaries from Europe—men and women who traveled by ship across the Atlantic to live in Native American communities. It was ultimately the day-to-day relationships formed by people working, eating, singing, and speaking together that would create the Moravians’ transatlantic network of people and places.³⁷ The Moravian missions were successful because they employed a two-pronged strategy that operated well on both a micro and macro level. In the larger sense, the Moravian Church had created links with the Danish and British Empires that allowed them to quickly build new communities or to establish a presence in existing communities already under the umbrella of larger colonial governing structures. But, on a smaller level, the Moravians’ missionary strategy skillfully deployed a network of hundreds of young men and women who ardently believed in the cause of spreading the Christian message to people living in every country and region. They were the cornerstone of the Moravian mission plan, and the success of the church’s agenda rested on them.

The first Moravian missionary to live in a Native American community in North America was Christian Heinrich Rauch. Despite having never left the small geographic area in Germany where he was born, Rauch was inspired at the age of nineteen to immigrate to America by a letter sent from a German (non-Moravian) settler already living in Pennsylvania. In late 1737, Rauch had sat on a long wooden bench in the Saal (worship hall) of the Moravian community of Marienborn, Germany, eagerly awaiting the reading of a letter from Moravian leader August Spangenberg to Christian David. It was dated November 19, 1737, and contained an account by Conrad Weiser, a German from the Palatinate who now lived in the Tulpehocken Valley of Pennsylvania. Thanks to his ability to speak several Native languages, Weiser now served as the principle messenger to the Haudenosaunee on behalf of the Pennsylvania and Virginia governments. Earlier that year, Weiser had experienced a remarkable encounter in the forest as he journeyed north to Onondaga. This is Weiser’s story, as told in his own words and heard by Rauch:

In the year 1737, I was sent the first time to Onondaga, at the desire of the governor of Virginia. I departed in the latter end of February very unexpectedly for a journey of 500 English miles, through a wilderness where there was neither road nor path, and at such a time of the year when animals could not meet with food. There were with me a Dutchman and three Indians. On the 9^th of April I found myself extremely weak, through the fatigues of so long a journey with cold and hunger which I had suffered. There having fallen a fresh snow about twenty inches deep, and we being yet three days’ journey from Onondaga in a frightful wilderness, my spirit failed, my body trembled and shook, and I thought I should fall down and die. I stepped aside, and sat down under a tree, expecting there to die. My companions soon missed me. The Indians came back and found me sitting there. They remained awhile silent; at last the old Indian [Shikellamy, Haudenosaunee leader at Shamokin] said, “My dear companion, thou hast hitherto encouraged us; wilt thou now give up? Remember that evil days are better than good days, for when we suffer much we do not sin; sin will be driven out of us by suffering, and God cannot extend his mercy to the former; but contrary-wise, when it goeth evil with us, God has compassion on us.” These words made me ashamed. I rose up and traveled as well as I could.³⁸

Weiser’s fortitude earned him the name Tarachiawagon (Holder of the Heavens) among the Haudenosaunee. In Marienborn, his account also stirred admiration, but not for Weiser. It was the words of Shikellamy that moved several of the young brethren to tears. Surely, here was a person upon whom the Holy Spirit was already acting. Christian Heinrich Rauch was inspired. By 1740, he had sailed to the New York Colony, and requested permission from community elders to live in the Mohican village of Shekomeko. He did not preach, but instead offered basic medical care to the community, and set about living his usual daily life, including speaking prayers and singing hymns in their midst. Eventually, Rauch was able to report to the church in Europe that three people had requested Christian baptism. More followed and Shekomeko became the first Moravian mission in America.³⁹

Early Moravian missionaries such as Rauch adapted to lifeways in Native American communities. They learned to boil maple sugar, interpret wampum, build and use bark canoes, and hunt using Native methods. They lived in bark homes and studied the languages of the communities they lived among. Rauch himself would learn to speak Mohican, Munsee, Unami, and Mohawk. According to an early Moravian Church history: “They [missionaries] earned their own bread, chiefly by working for the Indians, though the latter were not able to pay much for the produce of their labor. They lived and dressed in the Indian manner, so that in travelling to and fro they were taken for Indians. But whenever they could not subsist by the work of their own hands, they were provided with the necessaries of life by the Brethren [Moravians] at Bethlehem.”⁴⁰ When Rauch eventually built a Christian worship space in Shekomeko, it was a bark structure like the other buildings in the village. As Richard Pointer and Rachel Wheeler have both stressed, Rauch was seemingly a willing observer and practitioner of Mohican culture.⁴¹ He may originally have been interested in Mohican culture because he wanted to make sense of Native religious customs in order to present his Christian teachings in a more effective way, but by participating in local cultural practices he also participated in Native religious life. Missionaries such as Rauch listened to, recorded, and interpreted dreams, blessed hunters and hunting lodges, dispensed medicines, performed rituals for the dead and dying, and offered personal spiritual power through the blood of Christ.

When Christian hymns were sung, or sermons preached, they were usually done in Native languages. Because song, especially as a means of communicating with the divine, was an important part of religious life in Native and European Moravian communities alike, missionaries stressed this connection. In his foreword to his hymnal in the Delaware language, missionary David Zeisberger stated: “As the singing of psalms and spiritual songs has always formed a principal part of the divine service of our Church, even in congregations gathered from among the heathen . . . all our converts find much pleasure in learning verses with their tunes by heart, and frequently sing and meditate on them at home and abroad.”⁴² Hymns were a part of daily life for Native Christians, just as songs had always been a part of daily life in Native communities: they were sung to and by the sick and the dying. They were sung at gravesides. They were sung by men while hunting. They were sung by women in the travails of childbirth. They were sung to bring comfort, to call spiritual power, and to create and fortify community. They cemented treaties and sounded bravery in battle. And hymns became gifts that could be received from spirit helpers or manitou, continuing aspects of sacred song practices in Native communities. Hymns fulfilled similar functions in European Moravian communities, too, forging commonalities in the way that both groups understood the social, cultural, and spiritual purposes of song.⁴³

Rauch’s missionizing efforts were based on the Christian customs, theologies, and cultural ways that he had carried with him across the Atlantic. What theologies of song had he shared with residents of Shekomeko, and how had these theologies influenced their responses to Moravian Christianity? Rachel Wheeler has argued that there was a distinct difference between the missionizing efforts of the Moravians and the version of Christianity promulgated by English Congregationalist missionaries at the Christian Indian town in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. While Native Christian practice at Stockbridge was shaped around literacy—learning to read from the Bible and the hymnal and interpret Scripture—Moravians emphasized an embodied sense of theology that was principally conveyed through hymns and worship rituals, connecting with previous uses for sacred songs in Mohican communities. Moravians also emphasized teachings about the divine that connected with already existing spiritual understandings of manitou or spirit beings. Jesus was presented primarily as a God who had become a man, a great warrior who was killed, yet whose wounds and blood held redemptive, life-giving power. Rather than relying on biblical texts and exegesis, Moravian missionaries presented a distinctly embodied version of Christianity that particularly resonated with Mohican communities.⁴⁴ Moravian rituals and songs formed the core of missionary practices in North American mission contexts.

When Rauch arrived in the New York Colony in 1740, the Brüdergemeine (Brethren’s Community), known in English as the Moravian Church, was a new church body and its religious practices were still very much in development. The first Moravian community of Herrnhut (The Lord’s Watch) had been established in 1722 in southeastern Saxony. In the early 1720s, the young German nobleman Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf had purchased a large acreage along the Zittauer Straße, a road connecting the nearby towns of Löbau and Zittau, following his marriage to fellow noblewoman Erdmuthe Dorothea Reuss. At the time, the young couple could scarcely have foreseen the consequences of that purchase. By 1722, together with religious refugees from Bohemia and Moravia, members of the persecuted Protestant denomination of the Unitas Fratrum, they had established a small Christian town on their lands. Although the immediate aim of the community was to provide a sanctuary for Protestants persecuted by the Hapsburg Empire, in 1727, the community developed an entirely new mission. At a worship service on August 13, 1727, Zinzendorf and his fellow “Herrnhuters” sensed a particularly strong presence of the Holy Spirit in the church building, mirroring the biblical tale of the day of Pentecost. Although the worshippers that day hailed from many different Protestant backgrounds—Lutheran, Pietist, Unitas Fratrum—this experience of religious revival impelled them to come together as an entirely new church: the erneuerte Brüdergemeine (Renewed Brethren’s Community). Their religious fervor also encouraged them to move beyond the boundaries of their small community to spread the Christian message. Within the next twenty years, the people of Herrnhut had founded a transcontinental and transoceanic network of Christian missions stretching from Tibet to Suriname.

According to Zinzendorf, he had foreseen the development of this mission network in a dream in 1723. In this dream, the Holy Spirit had revealed to him a landscape with many Christian towns similar to the community of Herrnhut.⁴⁵ It was this specific method of planned spiritual landscapes and towns—communities that resembled each other in both worship and spatial construction—that would fuel the development of more than thirty newly constructed international settlements, in addition to numerous outlying missions such as Shekomeko that were established in already extant towns and communities. The planning of each new Moravian community’s physical structure was approved in Europe, and then constructed with natural materials available on site. Most settlements were built around a central town square, and contained communal houses and worship spaces, as well as gardens, trade buildings, and agricultural fields. Lifeways in Moravian communities were also predictably replicated based on a system of communal living called the Oeconomie (Economy), in which community members contributed their earnings directly to the church. Moravians were divided into gendered “choirs” based on age and marital status. The desired goal was to create a shared, spiritual space where each person could live solely for the purpose of serving Christ without fear of monetary poverty. Christ, and not a human church official, was the elder of all Moravian communities. At meetings, his presence was signified by an empty chair and his will was ascertained by casting of lots (das Los).⁴⁶ Lots were an important arbiter of not just communal decisions but also individual choices. Moravians carried pieces of paper or “lot chips” in their pockets that could be cast to invoke a randomized answer or “Christ’s will.” Lots settled disputes, interpreted Scripture, and sanctioned marriages, missionary activities, and social customs. The entire social organization of Moravian communities depended on the lot as an arbiter of social and spiritual will (fig. I.2a–d).

Lots also governed worship practices, including music. All Moravians learned to publicly demonstrate their improvisational abilities in daily musical worship services, called Singstunden (singing meetings). In a Singstunde, individual hymn-verses and phrases of chorale melodies, from a memorized repertory of several thousand preexisting hymns, were extemporaneously combined by a community member called a Liturg (worship leader, liturgist), and repeated by other participants to create a Liederpredigt (hymn-sermon). The Liederpredigt was itself a sounded explication of a particular scriptural passage called the Losung (watchword) that was chosen from a set of hymn verses and scriptural passages selected by Zinzendorf.⁴⁷ If no suitable verses could be drawn from the memorized repertory to suit the Losung, then the liturgist would improvise a new hymn. The entire practice was called “singing from the heart” (aus dem Herzen gesungen). The soundways of Moravian communities were therefore as planned as the buildings and communal living practices. The choir system immersed community members in a daily cycle of religious hymns and prayers, directing the entirety of life to spiritual contemplation and a close relationship with God. As these practices were replicated in each community, they constituted a worldwide community based on divinely communicated sound.⁴⁸

Transmitting the Gospel through singing was therefore an important part of Moravian missionary practice. Moravians did not rely on literacy to impart Christian teachings. Instead, rituals (baptism, communion, Singstunden), songs, and prayers were the main methods of connecting with potential Christians.⁴⁹ New Moravians were taught to improvise hymns as a way of channeling the Holy Spirit, a practice that required extensive training and study to learn. Moravians were also encouraged to sing in their own languages, and Moravian hymns in German were sometimes macaronic (sung in two or more languages) or incorporated “loan” words from various languages such as Hebrew, Mohawk, Mohican, Arawak, and Latin. Multilingual Singstunden and other worship services were characteristic forms of worship in Moravian missions, a practice that Joanne van der Woude has termed “polyglot harmony.”⁵⁰ Polyglot singing reflected the Moravian belief that singers were pre-sounding the voices of the multiethnic Christian community that would gather around the throne of God at the end of the world. In the end-time, the cacophony of the tower of Babel would be silenced and all people would sing with one voice.⁵¹ On Earth, in anticipation of that great awakening at the end of time, Moravians could improvise and sing multilingual hymns as a way of channeling their future divinity through the singing body.

Fig. I.2a Box of lots in German and English belonging to the Provincial Elders Conference. OC 210, MAB. Photograph by author.

Fig. I.2b Gold silk drawstring lot bag, with gold cord and tassels, containing 51 scrolls with daily watchword texts. OC 510, MAB. Photograph by author.

Fig. I.2c–d Lot boxes and chips. M.20, M.26, and M.28, UA Herrnhut.

Multilingual hymns were also a way to reflect a localized and indigenized version of Christian practice, and Moravians believed they further demonstrated the presence of the Holy Spirit in potential Christians. Missionaries were taught that the Holy Spirit must first be active in the hearts of those “who would hear the message.”⁵² Moravian missionaries should not concern themselves with converting large groups of people, but rather with seeking those who freely responded to the Christian message: “We are like servants at their master’s door who scratch softly so that those who will want to hear will hear, while others not so inclined can ignore us.”⁵³ Zinzendorf claimed that conversion was only accomplished through the Holy Spirit, and encouraged missionaries to only baptize those who they sensed had an intuitive feeling of the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives. But the work of conversion did not happen without missionaries themselves and the transmission of their particular beliefs and cultural norms. It was the distinctive worship practices of the Moravians that attracted a wide variety of people to join their church communities. While other Protestant groups, such as the Methodists, remained predominantly British and Anglo American, Moravian Church communities boasted an almost globally representative membership.⁵⁴

The founding of the Moravian missions in Pennsylvania began in 1740 with the arrival of a Moravian group from Savannah, Georgia. In 1735, Zinzendorf and the leadership of the Moravian Church had established a settlement in the new British colony of Georgia. That year, several Moravians had traveled to the colony, where they occupied a house in the center of Savannah. But while the missions in the Danish Caribbean thrived, the outbreak of war between England and Spain in 1739 destroyed the Moravians’ hopes for further missionary work in the southern British colonies. Fleeing Georgia, they sought refuge in the northern British colonies, arriving in Philadelphia in 1740 on the sloop of George Whitefield, a notorious and celebrated English revivalist. Whitefield had met the Moravians in Savannah while working with John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Episcopal Church, on behalf of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Whitefield’s destination in Pennsylvania was “Nazareth,” a 5,000-acre tract of Delaware land including the village of Welagameka that he had recently purchased from the Penn family at the Forks of the Delaware River. He intended to build a school for orphans and the children of slaves from the surrounding European settlements. Whitefield himself soon departed for England, but he appointed the Moravians to build the school in his absence, and allowed them to plan their own settlement on his land. However, within a year, theological disagreements about styles of prayer and Scripture reading erupted between landlord and tenants and the Moravians were evicted. It was then that the Moravian Church purchased its own parcel of Delaware land eleven miles south of Whitefield’s tract along the Lehigh River at the abandoned village of Menagachsuenk. There, in 1741, they began to construct their first newly built North American community, Bethlehem.

This new town was to be a geographical and spiritual center that would provide people, materials, and financial support for an expansive mission program. Its location on what was at the time the western boundary of the Pennsylvania Colony was ideal for a variety of missionary purposes. The area stretching from Bethlehem and the Lehigh River Valley southward to Philadelphia, including the Tulpehocken Valley, and the towns of Lancaster and Germantown, was the center of an active German religious diaspora. Lutherans, German Reformed, Arminians, Socinians, Schwenkfelders, German Old Tunkers, New Tunkers, New Lights, Inspired, Sabbatarians, Hermits, Independents, and Free Thinkers had all settled in southeastern Pennsylvania. For Zinzendorf, this offered an unprecedented opportunity to unite these disparate sects under one German church. Although Zinzendorf’s ardent plan for a united German church community never materialized, Pennsylvania also offered the chance to live in close proximity to many different Native American communities. By 1748, in accordance with Zinzendorf’s Heiden Collegia, at least 132 missionaries had been sent out from Bethlehem to work in communities from Pachgatgoch, Connecticut, to Meniolagomeka and Shamokin, Pennsylvania. Rauch’s small Christian congregation at Shekomeko, New York, would also eventually relocate to the area around Bethlehem, where they would build several new communities with other Native Christians from various tribal affiliations and backgrounds.

At the height of the Moravians’ presence among Delaware, Wampano, Haudenosaunee, Shawnee, and Mohican communities in the 1740s and 50s, the number of Native Moravians living at any one time in mission communities numbered at more than 250 individuals. A catalog of Native baptisms from Pachgatgoch lists 471 men, women, and children who were baptized from the beginning of the mission era to 1769.⁵⁵ But this early period of Moravian mission history was relatively brief. Surrounded by escalating conflicts between Native Americans, European settlers, and the European colonial empires of France and England during the Seven Years’ War, Native Moravian communities in eastern Pennsylvania were eventually destroyed or abandoned, and many members of the Native Moravian congregation fled westward into the Ohio Country. There, Native Moravians would struggle to maintain viable communities along new spatial, political, and cultural frontiers that would arise in the wake of the American Revolution. After the massacre at Gnadenhütten in March 1782, this once-vibrant community of Native Christians was reduced to a handful of families and individuals. Although the Moravian missions continued into the nineteenth century, with the establishment of new communities in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Ontario, the flourishing numbers of Native Christians who had chosen to live as Moravians, and the vital musical practices that had sustained the first forty years of the missions, no longer characterized life in these newer communities.

Re-Sounding the Moravian Missions

In writing this book, it was my desire to create a rich and inclusive narrative of sound and musical practices in the first forty years of the Moravian missions in North America. But I wondered whether a written book could truly capture the complex affective geographies of past soundscapes. Eventually, I came to the realization that if I wanted to create a new type of history—a sonic history—I would need to consider the possibility that communicating in sound might be an even more effective way to tell the story of the Moravian missions. It was the desire to incorporate sound into the book that led me to available digital technologies, such as mapping and sound design software (ArcGIS and Logic Studio), and the creation of the Moravian Soundscapes website, the online companion to this book. As you read this book, I invite you to simultaneously study and listen to the recordings on the website to explore what can be learned when a variety of approaches (sound studies and audible history, composition, historical performance, mapping and spatial humanities) are brought together to “sound” the history of the Moravian missions. The narrative of each chapter of the book is expressed on the website through interactive sound maps that contain soundscape compositions, field recordings, and historically informed recordings of spoken texts and hymns in Delaware, Mohican, English, and German. These interactive maps also contain the Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates for each location, making it possible to take the book and the maps to the places that are being discussed and to literally listen and learn in place.⁵⁶

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. See website Intro.3, Map collection: “Mapping Pennsylvania.” For instance, after the Native Moravian community at Gnadenhütten, Pennsylvania, was abandoned in 1755, Benjamin Franklin purchased the site and built Fort Allen on the opposite side of the Lehigh River. Over the intervening two and a half centuries, the settler community of Lehighton was gradually built around the fort and over the site of the mission. Using historic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maps, we were able to locate the original position of the mission on the southern edge of the modern-day Lehighton cemetery.⁵⁹ There have also been recent archaeological excavations to locate the Native community at Nain along the Monocacy Creek north of Bethlehem. We were able to obtain the archaeologists’ reports and examine artifacts from Nain, in addition to visiting the site and one of Nain’s original homes that had been moved into central Bethlehem in 1765.⁶⁰

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 See website Intro.4, Picture collection: “Modern-Day Pictures.” It was through these “place-visits,” literally reading the land as an archive, that my collaborators and I learned to look for traces of vanished places that were still written onto the landscape: the contours of the Moravian grain mill that had ceased operation more than two hundred years ago, but whose trace was still visibly carved into a meadow near the Monocacy Creek; the early King’s Roads that had once connected Bethlehem with the colonial Pennsylvania government at Philadelphia, simply paved with asphalt and renamed; and the ancient Minisink Path that linked Native American communities in the area for centuries before the arrival of German missionaries, now a gravel pathway beside a spring that had provided water to travelers for hundreds of years.

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, my collaborators and I also learned that while the mill trace, the King’s Road, the Minisink Path, and the site of the Rose Inn still existed, if you knew where to look for them, the sounds of eighteenth-century Bethlehem had vanished. How could we represent the acoustic environments that had once characterized life in Moravian communities? Were those soundscapes irrecoverable? Sometimes, when faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem, it helps to return to where you started. If we could map eighteenth-century Bethlehem, for instance, by using extant historic buildings, then we could also enter those buildings to learn more about how they operated as acoustic spaces. In addition, there are twelve museums in modern-day Bethlehem dedicated to historic preservation and education about the city’s Moravian past. Their collections house historic tools and implements, musical instruments, and other elements of Moravian material culture that once contributed to its soundscapes. And, every Thursday through Saturday, Bethlehem’s current blacksmith, Philip Trabel, utilizes the forge in the rebuilt blacksmith shop to make horseshoes, nails, and other metal products. Perhaps the sounds of Bethlehem had not entirely vanished. It would be possible, at least, to conduct acoustic studies and produce field recordings in some locations.

We began by recording the plantation bell at Burnside Plantation, a former Moravian farm that is now a museum on the outskirts of Bethlehem. We also obtained permission to do field recordings of hymn singing inside of the Old Chapel, the worship spaces in the Single Sisters’ House and Gemeinhaus, and to record Trabel’s work in the blacksmith shop.⁶² During the process of field recording, we also collected decibel readings at approximately five-foot intervals from the sound sources (singers, bells, forge). Then, we processed the readings through a mathematical formula for understanding sound decay over distance. The particular formula we chose was capable of taking into account various types of landscapes in Bethlehem over which sound might have traveled, including agricultural fields, coniferous and deciduous forests, grass lands, shrub lands (low trees and bushes), water, and urban or built environments. Our assessment of the historical topography around Bethlehem was based on a 1758 map by the Moravian cartographer Christian Gottlieb Reuter. Reuter helpfully designated varying terrains by type on the map, including particular species of trees. The resulting “sound boundary” maps, which can be found on the website under chapter 2, allowed us to understand what the geographic limits of Bethlehem’s soundscapes might have been, and how people might have understood the boundaries of their community by listening.⁶³ See website chap2.2, Interactive map: “Sound Boundaries of Bethlehem.”

We also wanted to represent sounds and places that were no longer present, and for which it was not possible to create field recordings. In seeking to replicate the diversity of acoustic environments and perceptions of sound that once existed in eighteenth-century Bethlehem, we took advantage of the spatial frameworks provided by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software and aural cartography or sound mapping.⁶⁴ We had already collected the spatial data necessary to reconstruct the built environment of Bethlehem, so it was only one further step to add sound to the maps. We felt that sound maps held great potential for offering the multisensorial approach to historic space that characterized daily life in Bethlehem. They could also allow us to reconstruct some sense of the Moravians’ cultural, social, and aesthetic perceptions of sound. Placing sounds within a spatial framework, such as a map could, we hoped, permit readers to explore new experiential and interpretive frameworks for understanding past soundscapes. However, it perhaps goes without saying that there were inherent challenges involved in this idea of reconstructed and experiential soundscapes, not least of which was the problem of how exactly to represent acoustic environments that no longer existed.⁶⁵ In the case of the sound maps created for the Moravian Soundscapes website, we turned to the work of electronic composers and sound designers for inspiration. Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp’s “imaginary soundscapes” or “virtual or simulated soundscapes” became the framing methodology for creating the sounded portions of the project.⁶⁶ In their work as electronic composers, both Truax and Westerkamp have simulated past acoustic environments through “soundscape compositions” created from digitally layered field recordings or prerecorded sound samples, generating what Truax has termed a “representation of acoustic environments.”⁶⁷

In the case of our sound maps, we created soundscape compositions from field recordings of available industrial and agricultural machinery recorded in Bethlehem. Some of the hymns that are layered into the soundscapes are also field recordings. Other hymns, and the Mohican and German dialogues and sermons that are also represented on the website, were recorded in a studio. However, since the soundscapes of Bethlehem itself have changed dramatically since the eighteenth century, we also used digitally sampled environmental and historical sounds from the sound libraries of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). These sound libraries were originally recorded by BBC recording engineers for film and radio broadcasts, and represent the soundscapes of various natural places and communities around the world. Of particular interest for our purposes was the BBC sound libraries’ “Industrial Sounds” collection that preserves the sounds of rare historic machines and tools such as a wooden lathe, a double-handled wood saw, and even a butter churn. Each sound file was available as a 16/44.1kHz stereo audio sample, and multitrack editing of these samples into soundscape compositions facilitated the recreation of the Moravians’ acoustic environments. The end result was a series of historically informed electronic compositions that provided a descriptive sense of historic acoustic environments.⁶⁸ See website Intro.5, Interactive sound map: “Moravian Soundscapes.”

For researchers interested in historic sound, soundscape compositions offer a model for reconstructing past soundscapes that simulate a coherent sense of an acoustic environment, even if formulated through the historical imagination of a composer. Both soundscape compositions and the performance or recording of past musical repertories stem from the desire to “sound” or to recreate historic aural experiences from an informed and academically rigorous perspective. Like other modes of historical performance, soundscape compositions are modern experiences and can only speculatively represent historical audible phenomena. Just as we can’t know exactly how a particular musical tradition was articulated by practitioners in the past, we can still strive to create modern renderings that are informed and informative.

What can we learn from re-sounding past acoustic environments? What are the advantages or disadvantages of such historical recreations? What insights do we stand to gain from the spatial humanities and sound mapping? In the case of Moravian Soundscapes, GIS technologies and sound mapping have been invaluable research methodologies in creating both the book and the maps. They have allowed me to more accurately convey the inherent emphasis in Moravian communities on sound, and sound maps have allowed me to directly, rather than abstractly, represent the sounds of places such as Bethlehem. They have also helped me to articulate the often intangible and elusive qualities of the Moravians’ sounded religious spaces and musical traditions. This has been especially important in my attempts to represent Moravians’ spiritual understandings of sound. According to composer Isobel Anderson, sound maps are particularly useful for mapping the “in-between spaces” of culture and society—the imagined and invisible relationships that constitute human experience of sound in the past and present.⁶⁹ Moravian communities existed as much in sound as they did in space. This type of spiritual understanding of sound is certainly not unique to the Moravians. But as scholars studying religious traditions of music, we are often tasked with representing conceptions of sound and space that are imaginative, theoretical, and spiritual. In our attempts to document the soundways of religious communities, we often discover that ideas about sound are more important than the sounds themselves. Sound maps are just one way we might more deeply explore the sensory and imaginative aspects of religious traditions and communities, whether historical or contemporary.

Sensory data and knowledge can also be an important part of the research process itself. Since my background is in musical performance, my approach to historical research on music and sound has been greatly influenced by musicologist Elisabeth Le Guin’s theory of applied musicology—the idea that there is a form of embodied knowledge gained through the physicality of playing an instrument or singing.⁷⁰ So I wondered if there could be a similarly embodied form of knowledge to be gained from “sounding” historical acoustic environments. Sound certainly has a direct relationship to emotion, memory, and instinct. Sensitivity to vibration is found in even the most primitive of life forms, and our brains have evolved over millennia to respond to acoustic signals and patterns.⁷¹ If acoustic knowledge is fundamental to our experiences of the world, then research processes and methods of historical inquiry that take advantage of the acoustical properties of sound might impart embodied forms of knowledge that deepen our understanding of historical times and places.⁷² In writing this book and composing the sound maps, I wanted to use my training as an academic and as a musician to imagine past soundscapes. I wanted to be a storyteller—a composer of both words and sounds. I have especially been inspired and drawn courage from Craig Womack’s assertion that history should be dreamed and imagined, and that we are called as historians (and musicians) to create stories that are compelling and rich:

History means very little until we develop a relationship with it that in this cyberage we might call “interactive” . . . I am talking about more than developing a capacity to empathize with people from our pasts. This has to do with placing ourselves inside their stories, becoming participants in history, more specifically, turning ourselves into characters in a story. History must be dreamed. It has to be authored. It must be turned into a fiction before it can ever be true. . . . This is the responsibility of any human being who desires an ethical relationship to her past. History is a vision quest, the quintessential religious experience. How else, if not through vision, can we access these experiences from the past so we may also experience them? This is how we approach the paradox we are up against. How can we ever know what experience is in its original forms, apart from mediation, interpretations, our perceptions? We cannot. Reality may exist with or without us, but whatever we can know is affected by our thoughts, no matter how spiritual the message. But we can imagine the places where experiences originate.⁷³

The book and the website are intended to be imaginative frameworks for Moravian places and experiences. They represent the journey that I have undertaken as author to understand how sound intersected with Moravian ideas of space, community, and spirituality. They also represent the journey that my collaborators and I undertook to understand Moravian places. And they represent the journey that you, as reader, might take. In digital and physical space, whether in person or by imagination, you might journey beyond the page, participating in these narratives out on the land in the places where these histories were shaped.⁷⁴ When you stand in these places, listen to the sounds around you. Imagine the layers of history underneath your feet, the traces and clues that previous generations have bequeathed us: names, stories, musical instruments, iron tools and wooden looms, buildings of stone and wood, and dug-out places in the earth. These are the sites of collective memory, of histories and soundscapes embedded in place. When we experience them in that way, we add our own stories, we add our own sounds.

Notes

1. Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, “Lied bey den Liebesmahlen,” Herrnhuter Gesangbuch (HG) Hymn 1340, verse 14. Hymn composed for the return voyage of a mission ship from St. Thomas in 1739.

2. Throughout this book, I have chosen to use “Mohican” rather than “Mahican.” While most ethnohistorians and anthropologists prefer “Mahican” because it is close to the Dutch “Mahikander” (a term also used by the Moravians), the sole descendant community on the Stockbridge-Munsee reservation in Bowler, Wisconsin, uses “Mohican” or “Muhheakunnuk” (https://www.mohican.com). Similarly, I also use “Delaware,” rather than “Munsee” or “Unami,” since it is the term currently used by many descendant communities. For more information, see the website of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, a descendant community in Oklahoma and Kansas (http://delawaretribe.org/services-and-programs/historic-preservation/removal-history-of-the-delaware-tribe/), and the website of the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown, a descendant community in Ontario, Canada (http://delawarenation.on.ca).

3. Obadiah Holmes’s account of the Gnadenhütten massacre is recorded in T. Holmes, The American Family of Rev. Obadiah Holmes (Columbus, OH: 1915).

4. Earl P. Olmstead, David Zeisberger: A Life among the Indians (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997), 333.

5. Letter written at Bethlehem, April 5, 1782. MissInd 151.6.8a, MAB.

6. Olmstead, David Zeisberger, 333.

7. “Johann Heckewelder’s Travel Diary of 1792,” MissInd 213.7, MAB. Translated in Paul A. W. Wallace, Thirty Thousand Miles with John Heckewelder, Or, Travels among the Indians of Pennsylvania, New York & Ohio in the 18th Century. The Great Pennsylvania Frontier Series (Lewisburg, PA: Wennawoods Publishing, 1998), 261.

8. For detailed histories of violence during the American Revolution, including religiously motivated violence, see Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (Broadway Books, 2018); and John Corrigan, Lynn S. Neal, eds., Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

9. Olmstead, David Zeisberger, 333.

10. Quoted in Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffmann, Jon Gjerde, and Thomas G. Paterson, eds., Major Problems in American History: Documents and Essays I (Wadsworth: Cengage Learning, 2012), 205.

11. Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact, New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5.

12. For more information on the daily integration of hymns into Moravian life, see Sarah Justina Eyerly, “‘Singing from the Heart’: Memorization and Improvisation in an Eighteenth-Century Utopian Community” (PhD diss., University of California Davis, 2007).

13. Although hymnody has often been overlooked as a cultural and musical form, there has been a recent resurgence in scholarly interest in hymnody from disciplines as diverse as religious studies, anthropology, performance studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, and African American studies. Interdisciplinary methods of studying hymnody featured prominently in a recent roundtable at the 2019 meeting of the Society for Early Americanists, “The Hymn in Early America: A Roundtable,” chaired by Chris Phillips (Lafayette College). The roundtable featured presentations on the revival hymn and the epic function in early America, poetry and hymnody in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Samson Occom’s hymns and the articulation of Native space, and two different discussions of Moravian hymns.

14. This study is indebted to the work of Barry Truax and R. Murray Schafer in defining the key concepts of “acoustic ecology,” “acoustic environment,” and “soundscape.” Truax’s Handbook for Acoustic Ecology and Acoustic Communication, have been especially helpful in building a framework for study of the acoustic environments of eighteenth-century Moravian missions. Based on Truax’s call to account for all environmental sounds within a given landscape, I aim to highlight the importance of studying the complex and interrelated patterns of sound that surrounded Moravian Christians and how these soundscapes helped to construct personal, social, environmental, and religious identity. See Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication, Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (Burnaby, BC: Cambridge Street Records, 1999); Barry Truax, “Soundscape, Acoustic Communication and Environmental Sound Composition,” in A Poetry of Reality: Composing with Recorded Sound, ed. Katherine Norman (Reading, UK: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997); Barry Truax, “Paradigm Shifts and Electroacoustic Music: Some Personal Reflections,” Organised Sound 20, no. 1 (April 2015): 105–110; R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977); and R. Murray Schafer, “Soundscapes and Earwitnesses,” in Hearing History: A Reader, ed. Mark M. Smith (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 417–431. I have also benefitted from path-breaking work in the field of sound studies by Richard Leppert, Mark M. Smith, Bruce Smith, Douglas Kahn, Alain Corbin, David Samuels, and Steven Feld. See especially Raymond Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Mark M. Smith, “Introduction: Onward to Audible Pasts,” in Hearing History; Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Alain Corbin, “Identity, Bells, and the Nineteenth-Century French Village,” in Hearing History; Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); David W. Samuels, Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, and Thomas Porcello, “Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 329–345; Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, Publications of the American Folklore Society 5 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); and Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, eds., Senses of Place, School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996).

15. Recent scholarship on Moravian mission work in general includes Stefan Hertrampf, Unsere Indianer-Geschwister waren lichte und vegnügt: Die Herrnhuter Missionare bei den Indianern Pennsylvanias, 1745–1765 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997); Carola Wessel, Delaware-Indianer und Herrnhuter Missionare im Upper Ohio Valley (Halle: Halle Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen im Niemeyer-Verlag, 1997); Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Merritt, “Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood: Moravians and the Indian Great Awakening in Pennsylvania,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 4 (1997): 723–746; Amy C. Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians, Early American Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Rachel Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); and A. G. Roeber, ed., Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early North America, Max Kade German-American Research Institute Series (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).

16. Walter Woodward, “‘Incline Your Second Ear This Way’: Song as a Cultural Mediator in Moravian Mission Towns,” in Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early North America, 125–142; Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly, “Songs of the Spirit: Hymnody in the Moravian Mohican Missions,” Journal of Moravian History 17, no. 1 (2017): 1–26; Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly, “Singing Box 331: Re-Sounding Eighteenth-Century Mohican Hymns from the Moravian Archives,” The William and Mary Quarterly 76, no. 4 (October, 2019): 649–696.

17. Glenda Goodman, ‘“But They Differ from Us in Sound’: Indian Psalmody and the Soundscape of Colonialism, 1651–75,” The William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 4 (2012): 793–822; Kristin Dutcher Mann, The Power of Song: Music and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain, 1590–1810 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press; Academy of American Franciscan History, 2010); Geoffrey Baker, Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Geoffrey Baker, “Indigenous Musicians in the Urban ‘Parroquias de Indios’ of Colonial Cuzco, Peru,” Il Saggiatore Musicale 9, no. 1/2 (2002): 39–79. For additional recent scholarship on transcultural musical exchanges involving vocal music and singing practices, see Linford Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Olivia Ashley Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music, New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Patrick Erben, A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact; Beverley Diamond, Native American Music in Eastern North America: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, Global Music Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Christine DeLucia, “The Sound of Violence: Music of King Philip’s War and Memories of Settler Colonialism in the American Northeast,” Common-place: The Journal of Early American Life 13, no. 2 (Winter 2013), www.common-place-archives.org/vol-13/no-02/delucia/; Joanna Brooks, “Six Hymns by Samson Occom,” Early American Literature 38, no. 1 (2003): 67–87.

18. Mann, The Power of Song, 260; Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America, Blackwell Companions to American History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 120. This book is part of a growing body of scholarship that builds on more recent and nuanced studies of Native American communities pre- and post-contact, and historical narratives of the eighteenth century that focus on both Native peoples and colonial settlers. Although missionaries provided the sources at the heart of this project, and those sources must be read carefully and critically for how they may present information on Native Christians, they are still valuable as historical evidence. As Daniel Richter has argued, if we are not prepared to include missionary- and settler-authored sources, then we must assume that whole categories of people will be simply left out of histories of the eighteenth century. Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 4–5.

19. See Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Peter Charles Hoffer, Sensory Worlds of Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Geoffrey Baker, Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco; and Sarah Keyes, “‘Like a Roaring Lion’: The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest,” The Journal of American History 96, no. 1 (2009): 19–43.

20. Keyes, “The Overland Trail,” 21–22.

21. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 322; quoted in Vine Deloria, Jr., “American Indians and the Wilderness,” in Religions and Environments: A Reader in Religion, Nature and Ecology, ed. Richard Bohannon (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 87.

22. Matthew Hunter Price, “Methodism and Social Capital on the Southern Frontier, 1760–1830” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2014).

23. George Tinker, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 9–10.

24. See Sarah Rivett, Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation, Oxford Studies in American Literary History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017).

25. Merritt, “Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood,” 736; quoted in Kyle Fisher, “After Gnadenhütten: The Moravian Indian Mission in the Old Northwest, 1782–1812,” Journal of Moravian History 17, no. 1 (2017): 34.

26. Fisher, “After Gnadenhütten,” 34. For recent works on Christian missions and Native communities, see Linford Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening; Joel Martin and Mark Nicholas, eds., Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); K. McCarthy, “Conversion, Identity, and the Indian Missionary,” Early American Literature 38 (2001): 353–370; and Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope.

27. For information on the musical and compositional training of Native American Moravians, and the collaborative process of creating Native-language hymns, see Wheeler and Eyerly, “Songs of the Spirit,” 1–26. See Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope, for a discussion of the indigenization of Christianity in Mohican communities.

28. See Luke E. Lassiter, Clyde Ellis, and Ralph Kotay, The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, and Indian Hymns (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Michael D. McNally, Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion, Religion in America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000); Tom Gordon, “Found in Translation: The Inuit Voice in Moravian Music,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 22, no. 1 (2007): 287–314; Tom Artiss, “Music and Change in Nain, Nunatsiavut: More White Does Not Always Mean Less Inuit,” Études/Inuit/Studies 38, no. 1/2 (2014): 33–52; and Sarah Eyerly, “Mozart and the Moravians,” Early Music 47, no. 2 (May, 2019): 161–182.

29. Lisa Brooks, “Digging at the Roots: Locating an Ethical, Native Criticism,” in Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective ed. Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 262, n. 30.

30. Craig S. Womack, “Theorizing American Indian Experience,” in Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective ed. Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 372.

31. Juanita Little, a Native Catholic nun, argues for an understanding of her own Catholic experience from a Native perspective: “No one asks can you be Irish and Catholic, or Peruvian and Catholic? What is so incongruous about being Indian and Catholic? . . . I want to tell my people. ‘You can be Indian and you can be Catholic. They are both the same.’ Except that in the Catholic Church, we are members, not just of the tribe, but of the world-wide family.” Juanita Little, “The Story and Faith Journey of a Native Catechist,” in Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada ed. James Treat (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2012), 218.

32. See Hoffer, Sensory Worlds of Early America, viii; and Merrell, “Indian History During the English Colonial Era,” in A Companion to Colonial America, ed. Daniel Vickers, Blackwell Companions to American History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 129.

33. Although this book focuses on the North American missions of the Moravian Church, there were Moravian mission settlements in Central and South America, the Caribbean islands, Greenland, Great Britain and Ireland, continental Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, Tibet, Siberia, Sri Lanka, Australia, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. For more information on the geographic extent of the missions, see Annegrete Nippa, Ethnographie und Herrnhuter Mission: Katalog Zur Ständingen Ausstellung im Völkerkundemuseum Herrnhut, Aussenstelle des Staatlichen Museums für Völkerkunde Dresden (Dresden, Germany: Staatliches Museums für Völkerkunde, 2003), especially the map and table of mission locations on pp. 12–13.

34. Heiden Collegia, MissInd 217.12b, MAB. The mission plan is also discussed in the Bethlehem Diary on December 24, 1742.

35. Zinzendorf was one of the first Europeans to travel north of the Kittatinny Mountains and into the river valleys of the Susquehanna and its western and northern branches.

36. The Heiden Collegia also included a plan for working with German communities in southeastern Pennsylvania by planting churches in Oley, Germantown, Philadelphia, Tulpehocken, and Fredericktown, and by establishing German schools in each area.

37. For more information on the transatlantic aspects of the Moravian Church, see Peter Vogt, “‘Everywhere at Home’: The Eighteenth-Century Moravian Movement as a Transatlantic Religious Community,” Journal of Moravian History 1 (2006): 7–29.

38. From a letter of “Conrad Weiser to a Friend, 1746,” quoted in Memorials of the Moravian Church, William Cornelius Reichel, ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1870), 89–90.

39. Shekomeko was the first mission established in an existing Native community. Bethlehem was the first fully Church-constructed Moravian mission town in North America. For more information about Rauch and the mission at Shekomeko, see Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope.

40. George Henry Loskiel, History of the Mission of the United Brethren, vol. II (London: printed for the Brethren’s Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel: sold at No.10, Nevil’s Court, Fetter Lane), 37.

41. Richard W. Pointer, Encounters of the Spirit: Native Americans and European Colonial Religion, Religion in North America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 143. Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope.

42. David Zeisberger, “Foreword,” in A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the Delaware Christian Indians, of the Mission of the United Brethren in North America, 2nd ed. (Bethlehem, PA: J. and W. Held, 1847).

43. Wheeler and Eyerly, “Songs of the Spirit,” 1. Also see Pointer, Encounters of the Spirit, 144; and Woodward, “Incline Your Second Ear This Way.”

44. See Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope, 95–104.

45. Paul Peucker, A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety in the Eighteenth Century, Pietist, Moravian, and Anabaptist Studies (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 19.

46. For an excellent overview of the use of lots in Moravian communities, see Gillian Lindt Gollin, Moravians in Two Worlds: A Study of Changing Communities (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).

47. Eventually, the watchwords were standardized and chosen at the beginning of each new year by Church elders by drawing slips of paper randomly from a bowl to represent each day of the calendar year. This is a practice that continues in the Moravian Church to the present day.

48. Sarah Eyerly, “Der Wille Gottes: Musical Improvisation in Eighteenth-Century Moravian Communities,” in Self, Community, World, Moravian Education in a Transatlantic World, ed. Heikki Lempa and Paul Peucker, Studies in Eighteenth-Century America and the Atlantic World (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2010), 201–227; also see Katherine M. Faull, “Speaking and Truth-Telling: Parrhesia in the 18th-Century Moravian Church,” in Self, Community, World: Moravian Education in a Transatlantic World, 204–230.

49. Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope, 6.

50. Joanne van der Woude, “Polyglot Harmony: Moravians among the Indians,” in “Towards a Transatlantic Aesthetic: Immigration, Translation, and Mourning in the Seventeenth Century” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2007).

51. Peucker, A Time of Sifting, 26.

52. Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope, 63.

53. Hans Rollman, Moravian Beginnings in Labrador: Papers from a Symposium Held in Makkovik and Hopedale (St. John’s, Newfoundland: Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, Faculty of Arts Publications, Memorial University, 2009), 135.

54. Peucker, A Time of Sifting, 4–5. The designation “Moravian” was a spiritual designation in the eighteenth century, and was not considered to be associated with race or ethnicity. The mission movement that began in the original community of Herrnhut may have started in Germany, but it has since that time evolved to become a worldwide church denomination. Currently, the African synods constitute more than half of the membership of the Moravian Church. For a discussion of the Moravian missions in Tanzania, see Anna Maria Busse Berger’s article, “Spreading the Gospel of Singbewegung: An Ethnomusicologist Missionary in Tanganyika of the 1930s,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 2 (2013): 475–522.

55. English translation of “Catalogue of baptized Indians in North America,” MissInd 3191.1, MAB.

56. This study aims to present what Anne Kelly Knowles and Amy Hillier have proposed as a new way of writing history that includes human experiences of space and place and affective geography. Scholars in historical GIS are increasingly interested in mapping frameworks that are capable of visualizing relations, networks, connections, emotions, and nonstandard patterns of movements. But it is my contention that spatial humanities approaches combined with audible histories have the potential to restore an almost multidimensional quality to the past. It is my hope to achieve a more holistic, sensory experience of Moravian mission history by combining the fields of geography, including aural and sound cartography and geographical information systems (GIS) with the fields of sonic and acoustic ecology, sound studies, and musicology. For recent scholarship on historical GIS, see Anne Kelly Knowles and Amy Hillier, eds., Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2008); David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, eds., The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship, The Spatial Humanities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010); and David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, eds., Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives, The Spatial Humanities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); Ian Gregory, A Place in History: A Guide to Using GIS in Historical Research, History Data Service (Oakville, CT: David Brown, 2003); Ian Gregory and Alistair Geddes, eds. Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS and Spatial History, The Spatial Humanities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014); Stephen Daniels et al., Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds (London, England: Routledge, 2012); and John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

57. Since maps are best at representing particular points in time, the sound maps that form the Moravian Soundscapes project are sited in 1758. By 1758, most of Bethlehem’s communal and industrial buildings had been completed, with the exception of the Widows’ House and the final addition to the Single Sisters’ House in 1768. Also, 1758 is the year best represented by archival materials (maps, diaries, artistic representations) from the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem. The soundscape compositions embedded in the sound maps are more specifically representative of a typical mid-morning in the month of May 1758. This project is also a part of a new and interdisciplinary field—digital sound studies—that lies at the intersection of sound studies and the digital humanities. For recent works on digital sound studies, see Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, and Whitney Trettien, eds., Digital Sound Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); and Rebecca Geoffrey-Schwinden, “Digital Approaches to Historical Acoustemologies: Replication and Reenactment,” in Digital Sound Studies, 231–249. For an excellent discussion of the difficulties involved in writing and researching aural history, see Mark M. Smith’s “Introduction: Onward to Audible Pasts,” in Hearing History, 417–431.

58. Christine DeLucia has argued for the importance of “digging deep in small places over time” and paying attention to artifacts, rituals, and other gestures of human experience. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 3, 10. Like Karen Halttunen, she advocates for historians to eschew the privileging of bigger histories of early America over smaller histories that are attentive to local and regional place. Karen Halttunen, “Grounded Histories: Land and Landscape in Early America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 4 (2011): 513–532. The maps for this book are created with the idea of representing localized and intimate Moravian ideas of space and place. The terms “space” and “place” are used in this book in ways that are reflective of how eighteenth-century Moravians envisioned their communities. “Space” and “place” may represent specific locations in the physical (i.e., human and natural) world, as well as Moravians’ conceptions of the environments they inhabited. However, it is also important to recognize a distinctly spiritual and intangible sense of location, which was an important concept in early Moravian mission communities. In this sense, the terms “space” and “place” are not tied to specific physical locations but represent instead an overlay of the spiritual world onto the physical geography of landscape. Like DeLucia, I hope that the recentering of place as a lens of analysis—rather than time, or the typical periodizations used in academic historical studies—can reveal alternative understandings of the past and geography. DeLucia, Memory Lands, 2–3. Also see Lisa Brooks, “The Primacy of the Present, the Primacy of Place: Navigating the Spiral of History in the Digital World,” PMLA 127, no. 2 (2012): 308–316.

59. After the first mission at Gnadenhütten, Pennsylvania, was destroyed in 1755, it was eventually rebuilt in Ohio in 1772. Moravian scholars typically refer to these two communities as Gnadenhütten I and Gnadenhütten II. I have chosen to avoid those designations in this book.

60. I would like to thank Janet Rice for sharing her work and that of her collaborators in mapping the archaeological sites for Native communities in Pennsylvania. Barry C. Kent, Janet Rice, and Kakuko Ota, “A Map of 18th Century Indian Towns in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Archaeologist 51, no. 4 (1981): 1–18.

61. DeLucia, Memory Lands, xxv; Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 13. Recent mapping projects by Lisa Brooks and Christina DeLucia of the indigenous geographies of New England have encouraged me to consider the wonderful benefits of “research road trips” and “place-visits.” I have also been encouraged in my efforts to create sound maps of Moravian places by DeLucia’s call to enliven historic places with alternate modes of seeing, touching, traveling, and mapping. She encourages historians of early American history to consider new ways of writing and mapping that reflect different stories than the ones traditionally told in settler colonial contexts. DeLucia, Memory Lands, 21, 330.

62. I wish to thank Philip Trabel and Charlene Donchez-Mowers and the staff of the Historic Bethlehem Partnership and Burnside Plantation, for their assistance with this project.

63. For the purpose of this project, we were interested in general information about the spread of sound to elucidate how Moravians may have heard and understood their community. Thus, sound recordings were assigned a general weight in the calculations with an assumed range of human hearing set at 0 dB with a lower threshold at –9 dB. It is our hope that additional studies may take into account deeper and more nuanced views of the spread of sound in Bethlehem.

64. There are a growing number of artists and researchers using GIS technologies to inscribe meaning onto space through sound. Some important examples include the soundwalks created by Hildegard Westerkamp and Frauke Behrendt; the “Under Living Skies” project by Eric Powell that recreates the soundscapes of Saskatchewan, Canada; Isobel Anderson and Fionnuala Fagan’s collaborative project entitled, “Stories Of The City: Sailortown,” which explores the soundscapes of the old docks area of Belfast, Ireland; Janet Cardiff’s soundwalks, such as “Her Long Black Hair” and “A Large Slow River,” that combine recorded voice with composed soundscapes in order to map a narrative onto a specific sound journey; and Jennifer Heuson’s “Soundscapes of The Black Hills,” which records various locations in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

65. There are not many researchers or composers experimenting with sound in time even though acoustic ecology is a growing field. In the field of archaeoacoustics, Miriam Kolar’s project on the acoustic architecture of Chavín de Huántar, Perú, uses computer modeling to understand how this 3,000-year-old ceremonial center in the Incan Andes may have been acoustically designed. Miriam A. Kolar, “Sensing Sonically at Andean Formative Chavín de Huántar, Perú,” Time and Mind 10, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 39–59. In terms of soundscape compositions based upon historic sound recreation, Maile Colbert’s sound projects, Passageira em Casa and Passageira australis, explore various sounds or locations in Portugal and Australia as heard and experienced through time. Several university-based research groups have published websites dedicated to sounding historical places, including the University of Cambridge’s “Seventeenth-Century Parisian Soundscapes Project,” and the “Sound of Paris in the Eighteenth Century” project at the University of Lyon. Some cities and cultural regions have also funded similar projects, including the “Vancouver Soundscape Project,” and the “Paisajes sonoros históricos de Andalucía (c. 1200–c. 1800) [Historic soundscapes of Andalucía project (c. 1200–c. 1800)].”

66. Barry Truax, “Sound, Listening and Place: The Aesthetic Dilemma,” Organised Sound 17, no. 3 (December 2012): 193, 196–197.

67. Barry Truax, “Genres and Techniques of Soundscape Composition as Developed at Simon Fraser University,” Organised Sound 7, no. 1 (April 2002): 12. Soundscape compositions are a style of composition pioneered at Simon Fraser University by the World Soundscape Project. Some early examples include The Vancouver Soundscape (1973), and Soundscape Vancouver (1996). Hildegard Westerkamp defines soundscape composition as electronic compositions that are created with recorded environmental sounds (Westerkamp, “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology,” Organised Sound 7, no. 1 (April 2002): 51). Soundscape compositions might explore structures and perspectives that mirror real-world experiences, such as listening from a fixed spatial perspective or moving through a connected series of acoustic spaces. They are also meant to convey a sense of real sound environments. In this sense, they are similar to the soundtracks of wildlife films, which are typically a combination of sounds recorded in the wild during the filming or previously, as well as sounds that must be recreated in a studio. These soundtracks are meant to provide insight into animal behavior, and to create a sense of a wild place, as well as to heighten the emotion and drama of the film. As a result, wildlife filmmakers often turn to sound designers to recreate something that simulates the sounds of wild places—a soundtrack that is in its essence true to nature, yet recreated from sound samples that may not have been recorded along with the film itself. This is similar to the comprehension of visual materials advocated for by photographer Dorothea Lange. For Lange, the camera was to be a tool to learn to see without a camera. In this way, recordings can also be envisioned as tools to hear places we have not experienced or cannot experience without the aid of recordings. See Bernard Krause, The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places (Boston: Back Bay Books Little Brown, 2013), 16.

68. Barry Truax makes a distinction between compositions based upon “sound effects libraries” and “soundscape documentation projects” (Truax, “Paradigm Shifts and Electroacoustic Music,” 109). The soundscape compositions in Moravian Soundscapes are not documentation projects, but historically informed recreations.

69. See Isobel Anderson, “Soundmapping Beyond The Grid: Alternative Cartographies of Sound,” Journal of Sonic Studies 11 (January 14, 2016); and S. Caquard, G. Brauen, B. Wright, and P. Jasen, “Designing Sound in Cybercartography: From Structured Cinematic Narratives to Unpredictable Sound/Image Interactions,” International Journal of Geographical Information Science 22, nos. 11–12 (2008): 1220.

70. See Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).

71. Seth S. Horowitz, The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 32.

72. Mark M. Smith, Mitchell Snay, and Bruce R. Smith, “Coda: Talking Sound History,” in Hearing History: A Reader, ed. Mark M. Smith (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 365–366. Also see Truax, Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, 126.

73. Womack, “Theorizing American Indian Experience,” 372–374.

74. See Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 124.