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Family House

Images of Family House

Beneath the Family House was a cellar with these vaulted or groined arches. The caption for this photograph reads: "Vaulted arches in the cellar of the Brewery. First of the kind in America." Photograph used courtesy of the Moravian Historical Society.

Although Christiansbrunn has been remembered and written about as a community of single men, married couples--often with small children--lived there as well. The married couples lived in the Family House. Nineteenth-century photographs and drawings consistently identify this structure as the "Brewery." The building had a cellar with groined or vaulted arches (see images 6 and 7), which were thought, in the nineteenth century, to have been the first vaulted archives in early America.

The image below locates the Family House on a 1795 map of the Christiansbrunn community.