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BETHANIA — Community gardens, biodiversity, the “locavore” food movement — what if it turned out that all these brainy concepts are as old as Muddy Creek and the people who settled here 250 years ago?

They were Moravians, a dozen men hiking 40 days down Indian trails from Bethlehem, Pa. Accustomed to the deforested, used-up plains of old central Europe, they liked what they saw of the Wachovia Tract in what is now Forsyth County: big hardwoods, edible and medicinal plants, nuts, seeds, plentiful wildlife.

“The most intriguing thing is how well-connected they were to the land,” said Kevin Redding, executive director of the Piedmont Land Conservancy. “They traveled a long way to get here, and they set up a very successful community.”

During the summer of 2009, the Piedmont Land Conservancy capped a decade-long effort to protect 152 acres to add to the total 500-acre

National Landmark site in old Bethania, which is surrounded by Winston-Salem and Tobaccoville and is one of the state’s oldest residential communities.

And the more the group has studied the color-coded land tracts from old Bethania, designed by surveyor Christian Philip Gottleib Reuter, the more the layout seems strangely forward-thinking.

Reuter may have had the French and Indian wars in mind with his Medieval plan — church and graveyard in the middle, then homes ringed by orchard lots and bottomland for communal agricultural use.

But from a contemporary perspective, Historic Bethania looks oddly trendy.

“The maps really do look like the new 'mixed-use habitat,’ a close neighborhood where you can walk to everything,” said Ken Bridle, the conservancy’s stewardship director. “And it basically has retained its colonial plan for 250 years.”

Other than the symbolic importance of Bethania — it is the state’s greenest town with roughly 30 percent open space — this is a key demonstration in a county where farmland preservation is a key concern.

Like a looking glass, motorists need only peer into the Yadkin River to see the effects of overdevelopment, runoff and highway projects such as the bypass that will run near Bethania.

Meanwhile, the shift to local food is the wave of the future — Moravian-style.

“You can barely get into the farmer’s markets anymore,” Redding said. “Protecting family farms is the future.”

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 336-373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com