Welcome to the Lehigh Valley Landmarks with Leon podcast series, celebrating 250 years of independence. I'm your host, Rachel Leon. Since being elected in 2022 and serving as Vice President of Bethlehem City Council, I'm humbled by the opportunity to serve the diverse communities that make up our great city. But to understand where we're going, we need to understand our past. Each week, I'll share a short feature with a big story about the 250 years that made the Lehigh Valley and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, known as the Christmas City, as we explore historic landmarks.
In the winter of 1776, carts began rolling into Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, loaded not with trade goods but with sick and dying soldiers from George Washington’s Continental Army. The men living and working in one building on Church Street were told to pack up. Within days, the largest structure the Moravian community had ever built stopped being a dormitory for craftsmen. It became a war hospital — one that would eventually hold ten times the men it was built for.
That building still stands today. It’s called the Second Single Brethren’s House, and its walls hold nearly three centuries of history.
To understand the building, you have to understand who built it. The Moravians were a Protestant community rooted in 15th-century Bohemia, and by the time they reached Pennsylvania they had become one of the most far-reaching missionary movements in the world. They founded Bethlehem in December 1741 and organized the community around the General Economy — every member contributed labor in exchange for food, shelter, and care — living in “Choirs” grouped by age and marital status, with single men, single women, and married couples each housed separately.
The Single Brethren’s Choir first moved into a stone building completed in 1744, housing fifty men. The choir outgrew it fast.
A larger building arrived in 1748. Built of native limestone with a gambrel roof and crowning balustrade, it was, per the Library of Congress’s Historic American Buildings Survey, the largest and most impressive structure raised in Bethlehem since the settlement began. At its peak it held 72 single men, who worked trades inside as part of Bethlehem’s self-sufficient economy. From its rooftop, members of the Moravian Trombone Choir — the oldest trombone choir in America — played to mark a death or celebration.
Then came December 1776. No Revolutionary War battle was ever fought on Bethlehem soil, but the war reached it anyway. Washington needed hospitals outside disease-ridden New Jersey and Philadelphia, and the Brethren’s House was requisitioned. From December 1776 through spring 1777, it held sick and wounded soldiers. Moravian leader John Ettwein recorded that the Brethren buried 110 unnamed soldiers, mostly from Virginia and Maryland, on a hillside now overlooking Route 378 — recognized today as a Revolutionary War mass grave.
The hospital reopened that fall after the Battle of Brandywine sent Philadelphia’s wounded north. By late December 1777, more than 700 men were packed into a building with capacity for around 360. Bishop Joseph Levering later called the overcrowded attic “a reeking hole of indescribable filth.” Disease, not battle wounds, killed most who died there. The hospital closed for good in 1778.
By 1815, the Single Brethren’s Choir had dwindled along with the General Economy, and the building passed to the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies. For 139 years it served as classrooms and dormitories, until the women’s college merged with Moravian College in 1953 and 1954, forming the Lehigh Valley’s first coeducational institution — known today as Moravian University.
What makes this building remarkable isn’t any single chapter — it’s the arc connecting them. A house built by pacifists for unmarried craftsmen became a Revolutionary War hospital within thirty years, then a landmark of women’s education, and has stayed in educational use since. The exterior has barely changed. As Lehigh University professor Scott Paul Gordon put it, the inside is transformed, but the outside is the same building those soldiers lived and died in.
Today the building holds Moravian University’s Music Department — a National Historic Landmark and UNESCO World Heritage Site in daily campus use.
The Second Single Brethren’s House is located at 99 West Church Street, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania 18018.
Information for this episode came from the Historic American Buildings Survey, the Moravian Church Archives, Historic Bethlehem Museums and Sites, Moravian University Archives and News, the U.S. Army Medical Department’s Office of Medical History, and the Associated Press.
