In 1835, Winston and Salem was a well-ordered, bucolic, and attractive
North Carolina town. A visitor could walk up Main Street from the
village square and get a sense of the quiet Moravian community that had
settled here. Yet, over the next half-century, this idyllic village was
to experience dramatic changes.
The Industrial Revolution calls forth images of great factories, mills,
and machinery; yet, the character of the Industrial Revolution went
beyond mere changes in modes of production. It meant the radical
transformation of economic, social, and political institutions, and the
emergence of a new mindset that brought about new ways of thinking and
acting.
Here is the illuminating story of Winston-Salem, a community of artisans
and small farmers united, as members of a religious congregation, by a
single vision of life. Transformed in just a few decades from an
agricultural region into the home of the smokestacks and office towers
of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and the Wachovia Bank and Trust
Company, the Moravian community at Salem offers an illuminating
illustration of the changes that swept Southern society in the
nineteenth century and the concomitant development in these communities
of a new ethos. Providing a rich wealth of information about the
Winston-Salem community specifically, From Congregation Town to
Industrial City also significantly broadens our understanding of how
wholesale changes in the nineteenth century South redefined the meaning
and experience of community. For, by the end of the century, community
had gained an entirely new meaning, namely as a forum in which competing
individuals pursued private opportunities and interests.
