Old Salem Museums & Gardens

Old Salem Museums and Gardens in Winston-Salem, North Carolina is a living history museum preserving the 18th-century Moravian community of Salem, founded in 1766 by Protestant settlers from Germany and Bohemia who created one of the most orderly and industrious planned communities in colonial America. The historic district consists of more than 100 original or carefully restored 18th- and 19th-century buildings integrated into an active neighborhood — visitors walk the same streets and enter buildings where Moravians lived, worshipped, and worked for over 250 years. Costumed interpreters demonstrate period crafts including pottery, tinsmithing, weaving, gunsmithing, and baking in restored structures like the Single Brothers House, the Miksch House, and the Winkler Bakery, where traditional Moravian cookies and sugar cake are baked in a wood-fired oven and sold daily. The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) within Old Salem houses one of the most important regional decorative arts collections in the United States, with furniture, ceramics, and textiles from the Southeast spanning 1670–1820. The Colonial Revival gardens include formal plantings and a Medicinal Garden with labeled specimens. The annual Christkindlmarkt held in late November draws thousands of visitors for traditional German Christmas market crafts, foods, and music in the historic streetscape. A visit covering the main buildings and museum typically takes two to four hours.