Moravian College

Moravian traces its origin to a girls' school founded in May 1742 by sixteen-year-old Countess Benigna von Zinzendorf. The young countess, on an eighteen-month visit to the Moravian settlements in the New World with her father, Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf, was following a Moravian tradition that was already old in her time. Benigna von Zinzendorf's school was the first girls' boarding school in America. It gained such a distinguished reputation that George Washington, during his second term as president of the United States, personally petitioned the headmaster for the admission of two of his great-nieces. The Bethlehem Female Seminary, as the school became known, was chartered to grant baccalaureate degrees in 1863, and in 1913 became Moravian Seminary and College for Women. A boys' school was established in Bethlehem in July 1742, and another in nearby Nazareth in 1743. These schools merged in 1759 to form Nazareth Hall, an institution which survived until 1929. In 1807 a men's college and theological seminary was established as an extension of Nazareth Hall. That institution, Moravian College and Theological Seminary, moved to Bethlehem in 1858 and was chartered to grant baccalaureate degrees in 1863, the same year as the women's college. In 1954, after two centuries of separate development and growth, the women's and the men's institutions were combined to form a single coeducational college. Moravian Theological Seminary maintained a closely related but academically distinct identity as a graduate school of theology. As a result of the merger, Moravian College became the Lehigh Valley's first coeducational institution of higher education.