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.
"The first tree was cut down about the time of the shortest day." Those words come from Bishop Edward de Schweinitz’s 1870 history of Bethlehem, describing December 21, 1740 — the winter solstice. On that day, in a snowy clearing along the Lehigh River, a sixty-four-year-old Moravian carpenter swung his axe into the first tree of what would become the first house in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
His name was David Nitschmann. So was his nephew’s. For decades, history has occasionally confused the two — even though one was a builder, and the other was the only reason there was anything to build.
Both men were born in Zauchtenthal, Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic. The elder David Nitschmann — known to the Moravian community as “Father” Nitschmann — was born on September 18, 1676. His nephew was born twenty years later, on December 27, 1696.
Both trained as carpenters. Both endured religious persecution as members of the Ancient Unity of the Brethren and eventually found refuge in Herrnhut, Saxony, the community founded by Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf as a haven for persecuted Moravians. From there, their paths diverged sharply.
The younger David Nitschmann rose quickly through the Moravian Church. In 1732, he sailed to St. Thomas in the Caribbean — among the first Moravian missionaries sent to enslaved people in the West Indies.
In March 1735, he was consecrated in Berlin as the first bishop of the Renewed Moravian Church. That same year, he led Moravian missionaries to Savannah, Georgia, aboard a ship shared with John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism. When that Georgia mission failed, the Moravians looked north — to Pennsylvania.
In late 1740, Bishop Nitschmann organized the passage to Pennsylvania for a small group that included his uncle, his cousin Anna Nitschmann, and several other Moravians. They landed in Philadelphia on December 14, 1740.
One week later, Father Nitschmann felled that first tree, working through snow deep enough that the settlers, as one account recorded, “often stood leg-deep.” The land did not yet legally belong to the Moravians.
That changed on April 2, 1741, when Bishop Nitschmann finalized the purchase of 500 acres at the confluence of the Lehigh River and the Monocacy Creek from Philadelphia land dealer William Allen, negotiated through an intermediary named Henry Antes.
With the land secured, Father Nitschmann led the construction of Bethlehem’s first structure: a log-house, forty feet by twenty feet. Thirteen settlers spent that first winter inside it.
The settlement had no name yet. That came on Christmas Eve, 1741, when Count Zinzendorf gathered the community for a candlelight service and led them into an adjoining stable, singing a German hymn: “Not from Jerusalem, but from Bethlehem, comes that which benefits my soul.” The name held.
Father Nitschmann is often called Bethlehem’s founder because he swung the axe and endured that brutal first winter. But the Bishop held the church’s authority to establish the settlement, completed the land purchase that made it legally possible, and provided the spiritual leadership that turned a construction site into a congregation.
Some nineteenth-century historians called him “unquestionably the founder of all the Moravian work in America.” The truth is neither man could have built Bethlehem alone. One man’s axe meant nothing without the other’s authority to claim the ground it fell on.
Both Davids are buried at God’s Acre, the historic Moravian cemetery in Bethlehem, located off Market Street in the heart of the original Moravian settlement that serves as part of the Moravian Church Settlements–Bethlehem UNESCO World Heritage Site. To learn more, visit historicbethlehem.org or the Moravian Church Archives at moravianarchives.org.
Information for this episode was provided by Bishop Edward de Schweinitz's history of Bethlehem as reproduced by Lehigh Valley History at lehighvalleyhistory.com; the Bethlehem Digital History Project at bdhp.moravian.edu; the Bethlehem Area Public Library local history collection; the Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature, and the Moravian Church Archives, Northern Province.
