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250 Years: Bethania serves up a taste of the past on its anniversary
Journal photo by Lauren Carroll
Ansley Weeks of Asheville cooks Johnny cakes, fried cornmeal patties, at Historic Bethania’s 250th Anniversary and Jubilee Celebration.
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Published: June 14, 2009
BETHANIA
There is no doubt who looked more comfortable in the middle of Bethania yesterday afternoon -- the 21st-century tourists in shorts sipping hard cider, or Terry Ramsbotham, dressed in a sweeping black skirt and hunched over hot coals, cooking 18th-century dishes.
But Ramsbotham seemed cheerful despite the heat, turning over fried cornmeal patties called Johnny cakes in a pan of sputtering butter. Her son, Jacob Tharpe, scooped up beans and barbecue from two pigs he spent the night before cooking over a fire. "Everything cooked on fire is good," Ramsbotham said.
Bethania celebrated its 250th birthday this weekend with music, tours, storytelling, crafts, historic demonstrations and refreshments.
Bethania was the second Moravian settlement in North Carolina, founded June 12, 1759, by settlers who had come from Bethlehem, Pa., six years earlier. The settlers lived first in Bethabara, then planned Bethania. "When the first settlers came here, there was an abandoned hunting cabin (at Bethabara) and it was just a convenient place to set up shop," said Daniel Crews, the archivist of the Moravian Church, Southern Province. "Bethania was a planned community because the idea was to start several settlements within the Moravian Tract."
Salem, where Old Salem is today, was founded in 1766.
Sixteen families originally moved to Bethania.
Today, some of the families that live in Bethania include descendents of the original settlers, Crews said.
Michael Leonard, the chairman of the town's historic association, moved to Bethania from Winston-Salem in 1994. He bought the house known locally as the Cornwallis House. It was built between 1770 and 1775.
"I went out there thinking it was going to be a bedroom community of Winston-Salem," Leonard said. "It's a very different place, with a very different community. You've got a lot of very modern people out there such as myself. But we live out there in this community that is established on these very, very old roots. You can live in the modern world but still live in a very rooted place."
Julie Gross of Winston-Salem and her niece, Haley Gross, 6, lingered by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy's exhibit, which included pens of sheep, chickens and small, sturdy horses. The group is based in Pittsboro and works to protect endangered breeds.
Haley liked holding baby chicks and petting the horses, a breed called Marsh Tacky, brought by Spanish explorers and settlers to coastal South Carolina and Georgia in the 1500s.
Julie Gross' boyfriend's parents live in Bethania, but she has another, if indirect, connection to the small, historic town.
"My family is from Bethlehem, Pa.," she said. "We would go to Moravian things there. It was kind of neat that we followed the same path down here."
The demonstrators included a tinsmith, a gunsmith and Jim Williams, a bookbinder from Charlotte, dressed in breeches. He became interested in bookbinding a few years ago, but he's been participating in historical re-enactments for 30 years as a Revolutionary War fifer. Now retired, he used to spend his work days doing a very modern job -- selling computers to bankers in Asia.
"I'd spend weeks in the 20th century and my weekends in the 18th century," Williams said.
■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com
■ Bethania will end its 250th anniversary celebration today with a communion at 11 a.m. and a Lovefeast at 5 p.m. at Bethania Moravian Church, 5545 Main St., Bethania. For more information, call 922-0434 or go to <span>www.townofbethania.org.
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